“Friends” star Lisa Kudrow is weighing in with her thoughts about the recent backlash that came with the show’s creator Marta Kauffman admitting she “didn’t do enough” to promote diversity on the ‘90s sitcom, which spanned 10 seasons between its 10-year-run from 1994 to 2004. As most will already know, “Friends” is situated around six white characters, with casting directors only ever having hired two people of color — a decision that executives behind the series are now saying they weren’t proud of.
Kauffman previously expressed that she would be donating $4 million to African American studies at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, insisting that her good deed was partially out of embarrassment for not being more considerate or inclusive while writing episodes for the show. But in a new interview with The Daily Beast, Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay, says the writers had “no business” penning stories about people of color.
People mad at Friends and Sex and the City for lack of diversity when the data shows 75% of white people don’t actually have any non-white friends.
Seems a fairly accurate representation of the average white person in NYC.
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) August 5, 2022
“Well, I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college,” she explained. “And for shows especially, when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color. I think at that time, the big problem that I was seeing was, “Where’s the apprenticeship?”’
Kudrow and her cast members Courteney Cox, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, Jennifer Aniston, and David Schwimmer became some of the highest-paid TV actors during their heyday, earning a cool $1 million per episode for the tenth and final series. The group reunited back in 2021 for a HBO Max special, where they, again, were said to have made $2.5 million just for their appearance fee, respectively.
Kudrow was further quizzed on whether she believed there was a chance “Friends” could be turned into a spin-off series, similar to how the “Sex and the City” franchise has transitioned with two successful blockbuster movies and the new “And Just Like That…” show on HBO Max.
It wasn’t the lack of diversity it was the fact that Friends went out of its way to make NYC as white as possible. SITC didn’t do that. There was diverse representation on that show from the jump. Not so with Friends
— Sons of Killmonger & Disciple of Dark Brandon (@2Strong2Silence) August 5, 2022
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“This was a multi-camera sitcom, and it had a different energy to it,” Kudrow retorted. “I think if there would ever be anything like that, if Marta and David ever signed off on anything like that, it would have to be a different cast at that age. I think it would need to be more current—and more diverse representation is not a bad idea, you know?”
In a previous interview, Kudrow had said that she believed “Friends” was very much ahead of its time and that the topics and storylines they were often tackling were “progressive” and sparked conversations with its core audience. She gave one example during a chat with ET Canada in 2020, recounting the man whose wife found out she was gay and pregnant, yet they still chose to raise the child together.
“We had surrogacy too. It should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what it did wrong.”