'Friends' actors were 'aggressive' and 'unhappy' in later seasons, writer says
According to Patty Lin, the stars felt "chained to a tired old streak" and behaved like one.
Write for a show like popular as Friends it sounds like a dream job for a TV screenwriter, but one person who worked on the hit show says it wasn't all it was made out to be. Patty Lin joined the show's writers room for season 7 in 2000 and quickly made an impression of the hugely famous cast. In an excerpt from his memoirs, End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood , published by Time , the author writes that the stars of Friends "seemed unhappy being chained to a tired old show" and willfully ruining jokes they didn't like. Read on to learn more.
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Lin wrote for some of the most influential shows of the 2000s.
Lin pursued a career as a television screenwriter for 10 years before retiring in 2008 at the age of 38. In addition to Friends , she wrote for Desperate Housewives And Break the bad . before joining Friends , she has been writing since freaks and geeks , which only lasted one season but is considered a cult classic. She had only been a television writer for a short time when she was offered a job on the sitcom Must-See TV.
"Write for Friends after just two years of experience, it was like going straight to the Olympics after just learning to skate," she wrote in her memoir. "If I got it wrong, it could ruin my career."
The editorial team was not welcoming.
While Lin worried about how she would fit in because she felt drama and not comedy was her strength, she ran into other problems while working on Friends . Of the 14 writers in total, she was from a racial minority and had difficulty working with her colleagues.
“Despite all my fears about this new job, I never anticipated that one of the challenges I would face would be that the Friends The writing team was clicky, more so than any other show I would work on," she wrote.
She also talks about the hours the staff spent "keep rewriting stuff that was funny the first time around." Sometimes they were asked to, because the live studio audience wouldn't laugh hard enough at a joke. This did not take into account that the studio audience was often tired from the time they had to stand there.
Lin also doesn't have a lot of positive things to say about the show's co-creators. In the book, she describes David Crane as "an unsatisfactory workaholic", and writes about Marta Kaufman , "I would do anything to avoid being alone with her and having to chat, which always seemed stuffy to me."
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She says the actors purposely spoiled the jokes during the table reads.
Lin writes that one of the purposes of the episode script reading tables was "for the actors to judge the script (so they could complain about it later)." She claims stars sometimes made bad jokes on purpose, so they were either removed or replaced.
“The actors seemed unhappy to be chained to a tired old series when they could branch out, and I felt like they constantly wondered how each storyline would serve them specifically,” Lin writes. "They all knew how to laugh, but if they didn't like a joke, they seemed to deliberately reject it, knowing we'd rewrite it."
"Dozens of good jokes were thrown just because one of them mumbled the phrase through a bite of bacon," she explains. "David and Marta never said, 'That joke is funny. The actor just needs to sell it.'"
She also says the stars have been "aggressive" in protecting their characters.
After reading the board, one of the next steps in creating an episode was to walk through the board itself. ae0fcc31ae342fd3a1346ebb1f342fcb
"It was the first opportunity for the actors to voice their opinions, which they did vehemently," Lin wrote. "They rarely had anything positive to say, and when they raised issues, they offered no workable solution."
Lin says that the actors thought of themselves as "guardians of their characters", and so they frequently asserted that their characters wouldn't do or say certain things. "It was helpful at times, but overall these sessions had a terrible, aggressive character that lacked all the levity you expect from sitcom directing," she continues.
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Lin had a positive interaction with an actor.
Lin was an extra in the episode "The One With All the Candy", directed by David Schwimmer . Lin writes that she was happy that the actor referred to her personally when he was directing the scene.
"Patty, can you come closer to the door?" she says he asked her. "I hesitated, delighted that instead of saying, 'Hey you,' Schwimmer addressed me by name. That night was the highlight of my stay. Friends experience. For once, I felt like I had something to do with the show."
Some stars have admitted that they are ready to end the series.
Lin only worked on Friends for a season. The show returned for three more. When it ended in 2004, Jennifer Aniston admitted that she was ready to move on.
"I had a few issues that I was dealing with. I wanted this to end while people still loved us and we were on top," Aniston told NBC News. "And then I also felt - I felt - like I had even more Rachel inside me? What more - what more - how many more stories is there? there to tell for all of us before we are now pathetic."
Similarly, Schwimmer said in his own interview with NBC News about the end of the show , "For some reason, there's no fear. I'm not scared at all. I'm more excited than anything. I mean, it's just been a great ride, you know. And I think we all feel like that's right—we've reached our time to move on.
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