FRİENDS 1

Season 5

Main article: Friends (season 5)
Ross and Emily marry, but an angry and humiliated Emily flees the reception. Rachel soon admits her love for Ross, but realizing how ridiculous this is, advises him to work on his marriage to Emily. She develops a crush on her neighbor Danny and they date briefly, until she realizes that he is too close with his sister. Monica and Chandler try to keep their new relationship a secret from their friends. Phoebe gives birth to triplets in the show's 100th episode. She gives birth to a boy, Frank Jr. Jr., and two girls, Leslie and Chandler, the latter of whom was supposed to be a boy, but was later revealed to be a girl.
After weeks of trying to contact her, Emily agrees to reconcile with Ross and move to New York if he breaks off all communication with Rachel. Ross agrees, but later attends a dinner with all his friends, Rachel included. Emily phones Ross, discovers Rachel is there, realizes she does not trust him and ends their marriage. Ross takes out his anger at work, resulting in him being indefinitely suspended from the museum, and he moves in with Chandler and Joey until eventually getting a new apartment across the street from them.
Rachel gets a new job at Ralph Lauren. Phoebe has a brief relationship with a police officer, Gary (Michael Rapaport), after finding his badge and using it as her own. Monica and Chandler go public with their relationship, to the surprise and delight of their friends. They decide to get married on a trip to Las Vegas, but change their plans after witnessing Ross and Rachel drunkenly stumbling out of the wedding chapel.

Season 6

Main article: Friends (season 6)
In the season 6 premiere, Ross and Rachel's marriage turns out to be a drunken mistake that neither remembers until the other friends mention it. Ross promises Rachel he will get them an annulment, then secretly does nothing because he cannot face having three failed marriages. By the time Rachel discovers they are still married, an annulment is impossible due to their history; they are forced to get a divorce. After ignoring the numerous signs that they should get married, Monica and Chandler decide to live together, forcing Rachel to move in with Phoebe. Joey gets a new roommate, Janine (Elle Macpherson).
They develop feelings for each other and date briefly until Janine criticizes Monica and Chandler, ending the relationship. After Janine moves out, Joey struggles with paying his bills so he takes a job at Central Perk. He soon lands a role on a cable TV series called Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E., starring alongside a crime-fighting robot. Ross gets a teaching job at New York University. He dates Elizabeth (Alexandra Holden), a student, despite it being against university policy. Elizabeth's father, Paul (Bruce Willis), disapproves of Ross but falls for Rachel, and they start dating.
Both relationships soon end: Elizabeth is too immature for Ross, and previously reserved Paul opens up emotionally and is more than Rachel can handle. Phoebe and Rachel's apartment catches fire, and Rachel moves in with Joey, while Phoebe stays with Chandler and Monica, though they later switch. While at a museum that has a two-year wait for weddings, Monica puts her name on the reservation list as a joke. When Chandler intercepts the museum's phone call about a cancellation, he panics; however, Chandler has been planning to propose while pretending he may never want to marry.
While dining at a fancy restaurant, Chandler's planned proposal is subverted by Monica's ex-boyfriend Richard Burke, who unexpectedly shows up. Richard later tells Monica he wants to marry her and have children. Monica becomes upset at Chandler, believing his ruse about not wanting to marry. Chandler believes Monica has left him until he comes home to find their apartment decorated with candles and her waiting to propose to him. When she becomes too emotional to continue, Chandler proposes and she accepts.

Season 7

Main article: Friends (season 7)
The seventh season mainly follows Monica and Chandler as they plan their wedding amid various problems. Joey's television series, Mac and C.H.E.E.S.E is canceled, but he is offered his old role on Days of Our Lives; the show is retconned with the revelation that Dr. Drake Ramoray has been in a four-year coma and is revived with a brain transplant from another character. Phoebe's repaired apartment now has one large bedroom instead of the original two, so Rachel permanently stays at Joey's. Rachel is promoted at Ralph Lauren and impulsively hires a young assistant, Tag Jones (Eddie Cahill), based on his looks, passing over a more qualified woman. Tag discovers her feelings about him at Thanksgiving dinner, and they begin dating, hiding it from co-workers. However, on her 30th birthday, Rachel ends their relationship, realizing Tag is too young and immature, particularly if she intends to follow her marriage schedule.
Hours before Monica and Chandler's wedding ceremony, Chandler panics and goes into hiding just as Phoebe and Rachel find a positive pregnancy test in Monica and Chandler's bathroom. They assume Monica is pregnant. Ross and Phoebe find Chandler and convince him to return for the ceremony, though he briefly bolts again after overhearing Phoebe and Rachel discussing the pregnancy test. He quickly returns, embracing the idea of fatherhood. After the ceremony, Monica denies she is pregnant; unbeknown to everyone, the positive pregnancy test is Rachel's.

Season 8

Main article: Friends (season 8)
Season 8 begins at Monica and Chandler's wedding reception. Phoebe and Monica discover Rachel's pregnancy and persuade her to take another test to confirm it. Phoebe initially claims the test is negative, badly disappointing Rachel, then reveals it is positive, saying Rachel now knows how she really feels about having a baby. Ross is eventually revealed to be the father, and the season revolves around Rachel's pregnancy. Rachel and Ross agree to be co-parents without resuming their romantic relationship; Ross begins dating Mona (Bonnie Somerville), who is Monica's co-worker from Allesandro's.
Joey takes Rachel out to quell her fears about motherhood, and realizes he has romantic feelings for her. While suppressing his feelings, he encourages Rachel to stay at Ross's apartment so he can be involved in the pregnancy. The arrangement is too much for Mona, and she breaks up with Ross. Joey tells Ross about his feelings for Rachel. Ross initially is angry, then gives his blessing. Joey tells Rachel that he loves her, but she realizes she does not feel the same way, and they remain friends. When Rachel goes into labor, Ross's mother gives him a family heirloom ring and encourages him to propose to Rachel. Ross hesitates, and puts the ring in his jacket, which he later leaves in Rachel's room.
After Monica jokes about having kids, she and Chandler decide to have a baby, starting while they are still at the hospital. After a prolonged labor, during which numerous other expectant mothers, including Janice, are taken to the delivery room, Rachel gives birth to baby Emma. She is left saddened and afraid after Janice later says that Ross may not always be there for her and the baby. When Joey comforts Rachel, the ring falls from Ross's jacket to the floor. Joey kneels to pick it up, and Rachel, believing he is proposing, impulsively says yes. Meanwhile, Ross intends to ask Rachel if she wants to resume their relationship.

Season 9

Main article: Friends (season 9)
Season nine begins with Ross and Rachel cohabitating with their daughter Emma, after Joey and Rachel clear up the proposal misunderstanding. Monica and Chandler run into obstacles as they try for a baby: Chandler unknowingly agrees to a work transfer to Tulsa just as Monica is offered a head chef job at a new restaurant, Javu, resulting in Chandler commuting back and forth. After being apart from Monica during Christmas, Chandler quits to pursue a new career in advertising, starting as an unpaid intern at an ad agency, and eventually being hired as a junior copywriter. Monica and Chandler discover they are physically incompatible to conceive and after considering multiple options, decide to adopt.
Phoebe begins dating Mike Hannigan (Paul Rudd) for most of the season until Mike says that he never wants to marry again. Phoebe dates her ex-boyfriend from season 1, David (Hank Azaria) who plans on proposing to her, but Mike proposes first. Phoebe rejects both proposals but gets back together with Mike, only needing the reassurance that they have a future together. Rachel, believing that her co-worker Gavin (Dermot Mulroney) is trying to steal her job while she is on maternity leave, returns to Ralph Lauren early. She discovers at her birthday party that Gavin has feelings for her. They kiss but do not pursue a relationship due to her history with Ross.
Meanwhile, Ross, having seen the kiss, retaliates by dating other women. After realizing that her and Ross's living situation is too weird, Rachel and Emma move in with Joey. Rachel develops a crush on him, only to be disheartened when he starts dating Charlie (Aisha Tyler), a new palaeontology professor to whom Ross is attracted. In the finale, the group travels to Barbados for Ross's keynote speech at a conference. Joey and Charlie break up upon realizing they have nothing in common. Joey then learns about Rachel's feelings for him, but says they cannot pursue this because of Ross. However, upon seeing Ross and Charlie kiss each other, he goes to Rachel's hotel room, and the finale ends with them kissing.

Season 10

Main article: Friends (season 10)
The tenth season brings several long-running story lines to a close. Joey and Rachel try to contend with Ross's feelings about their relationship, and after disastrous attempts to consummate, decide it is best they remain friends. Charlie breaks up with Ross to get back together with her ex-boyfriend. Mid-season, Joey officiates Phoebe and Mike's wedding outside the Central Perk coffee house after a snow storm paralyzes the city, preventing them and guests getting to the wedding venue. Monica and Chandler are chosen by a pregnant woman named Erica (Anna Faris) to adopt her baby.
Following this, Monica and Chandler prepare to move to a house in the suburbs to raise their family, saddening everyone, particularly Joey, who is coping with all the changes in his life. In the series finale, Erica gives birth to fraternal twins, much to Monica and Chandler's surprise. Rachel is fired from Ralph Lauren after her boss overhears her interviewing for a job at Gucci. She encounters her former Bloomingdale co-worker Mark, who offers her a new job at Louis Vuitton in Paris. Ross, believing Rachel wants to stay, tries bribing Mr. Zelner to rehire her until he realizes Rachel wants to go to Paris. When Rachel says a tearful personal goodbye to everyone except Ross at her going away party, a hurt and angry Ross confronts Rachel, and they end up sleeping together.
Rachel leaves, and Ross – realizing how much he loves Rachel – chases her to the airport. When he reaches her, Rachel says she has to go to Paris. Before the plane takes off, Rachel calls Ross's home phone and leaves a voice mail, apologizing for the way it ended. While speaking, she realizes that she loves him too, and gets off the plane at the last minute. The series ends with all the friends, plus Monica and Chandler's new babies, leaving the empty apartment together for a final cup of coffee at Central Perk. The show ends first with a shot of everyone's keys to Monica and Chandler's apartment left on the counter top, and then pans to a shot of the apartment's purple door.

Production

Conception

It's about sex, love, relationships, careers, a time in your life when everything's possible. And it's about friendship because when you're single and in the city, your friends are your family.
— The original treatment used by Crane, Kauffman and Bright to pitch the series to NBC.[49]

David Crane and Marta Kauffman began developing three new television pilots that would premiere in 1994 after their sitcom Family Album was cancelled by CBS in 1993.[50] Kauffman and Crane decided to pitch the series about "six people in their 20s making their way in Manhattan" to NBC since they thought it would fit best there.[51] (Film director and screenwriter Cameron Crowe has asserted that the concept originated with Warner Bros. Television wanting him to make his 1992 movie Singles into a television show.[52][53] Crowe alleges that when he refused permission, the idea was then taken over by Crane and Kaufman, who changed some details from the premise of the movie while developing the show.[52][53])
Crane and Kauffman presented the idea to their production partner Kevin Bright, who had served as executive producer on their HBO series Dream On.[54] The idea for the series was conceived when Crane and Kauffman began thinking about the time when they had finished college and started living by themselves in New York; Kauffman believed they were looking at a time when the future was "more of a question mark."[49] They found the concept to be interesting, as they believed "everybody knows that feeling",[49] and because it was also how they felt about their own lives at the time.[49] The team titled the series Insomnia Cafe and pitched the idea as a seven-page treatment to NBC in December 1993.[49][51]
At the same time, Warren Littlefield, the then-president of NBC Entertainment, was seeking a comedy involving young people living together and sharing expenses. Littlefield wanted the group to share memorable periods of their lives with friends, who had become "new, surrogate family members."[19] However, Littlefield found difficulty in bringing the concept to life and found the scripts developed by NBC to be terrible. When Kauffman, Crane and Bright pitched Insomnia Cafe, Littlefield was impressed that they knew who their characters were.[19] NBC bought the idea as a put pilot, meaning they risked financial penalties if the pilot was not filmed.[55]
Kauffman and Crane took three days to write the pilot script for a show they titled Friends Like Us.[49][56] Littlefield wanted the series to "represent Generation X and explore a new kind of tribal bonding", but the rest disagreed. Crane argued that it was not a series for one generation, and wanted to produce a series that everyone would enjoy watching.[19] NBC liked the script and ordered the series. They changed the title to Six of One, mainly because they felt Friends Like Us was too similar to the ABC sitcom These Friends of Mine.[57]

Casting

See also: The Pilot (Friends)
The producers wanted Courteney Cox (pictured) to portray Rachel; however, Cox wanted to play Monica and co-creator Marta Kauffman agreed after watching the audition.
Once it became apparent that the series was a favored project at NBC, Littlefield reported that he was getting calls from every agent in town, wanting their client to be a part of the series.[19] Auditions for the lead roles took place in New York and Los Angeles.[58] The casting director shortlisted 1,000 actors who had applied for each role down to 75. Those who received a callback read in front of Crane, Kauffman and Bright. At the end of March, the number of potential actors had been reduced to three or four for each part, and these actors were asked to read for Les Moonves, then president of Warner Bros. Television.[59]
Having worked with David Schwimmer in the past,[58] the series creators wrote the character of Ross with him in mind, and he was the first actor cast.[60] Cox wanted to play the role of Monica because she liked the "strong" character, but the producers had her in mind to play Rachel because of her "cheery, upbeat energy", which was not how they envisioned Monica; after Cox's audition, though, Kauffman agreed with Cox, and she got the role.[49][61] When Matt LeBlanc auditioned for Joey, he put a "different spin" on the character.[49] He played Joey more simple-minded than intended and gave the character heart. Although Crane and Kauffman did not want LeBlanc for the role at the time, they were told by the network to cast him.[49] Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry and Lisa Kudrow were cast based on their auditions.[58] Perry and Aniston, both still under contract to other shows that year, were cast days before shooting of the pilot began.[62]
More changes occurred to the series's storylines during the casting process. The writers found that they had to adjust the characters they had written to suit the actors, and the discovery process of the characters occurred throughout the first season. Kauffman acknowledged that Joey's character became "this whole new being", and that "it wasn't until we did the first Thanksgiving episode that we realized how much fun Monica's neuroses are."[63]

Writing

In the weeks after NBC's pick up of Friends, Crane, Kauffman and Bright reviewed sent-in scripts that writers had originally prepared for other series, mainly unproduced Seinfeld episodes.[64] Kauffman and Crane hired a team of seven young writers because "When you're 40, you can't do it anymore. The networks and studios are looking for young people coming in out of college."[65] The creators felt that using six equal characters, rather than emphasizing one or two, would allow for "myriad storylines and give the show legs."[30] The majority of the storyline ideas came from the writers, although the actors added ideas.[58] Although the writers originally planned the big love story to be between Joey and Monica, the idea of a romantic interest between Ross and Rachel emerged during the period when Kauffman and Crane wrote the pilot script.[49]
During the production of the pilot, NBC requested that the script be changed to feature one dominant storyline and several minor ones, but the writers refused, wanting to keep three storylines of equal weight.[57] NBC also wanted the writers to include an older character to balance out the young ones. Crane and Kauffman were forced to comply and wrote a draft of an early episode that featured "Pat the Cop". who would be used to provide advice to the other characters. Crane found the storyline to be terrible, and Kauffman joked, "You know the kids [sic] book, Pat the Bunny? We had Pat the Cop." NBC eventually relented and dropped the idea.[49]
Each summer, the producers would outline the storylines for the subsequent season.[66] Before an episode went into production, Kauffman and Crane would revise the script written by another writer, mainly if something concerning either the series or a character felt foreign.[64] The hardest episodes to write were always "the first one and the last one of each season."[67] Unlike other storylines, the idea for a relationship between Joey and Rachel was decided on halfway through the eighth season. The creators did not want Ross and Rachel to get back together so soon, and while looking for a romantic impediment, a writer suggested Joey's romantic interest in Rachel.[66]
The storyline was incorporated into the season; however, when the actors feared that the storyline would make their characters unlikable, the storyline was wrapped up, until it again resurfaced in the season's finale. For the ninth season, the writers were unsure about the amount of storyline to give to Rachel's baby, as they wanted the show neither to revolve around a baby nor pretend there to be none.[66] Crane said that it took them a while to accept the idea of a tenth season, which they decided to do because they had enough stories left to tell to justify the season. Kauffman and Crane would not have signed on for an eleventh season, even if all the cast members had wanted to continue.[63]
The episode title format—"The One ..."[68]—was created when the producers realized that the episode titles would not be featured in the opening credits, and therefore would be unknown to most of the audience. Episode titles officially begin with "The One ..." except the title of the pilot episode and the series finale "The Last One". The season 5 episode "The One Hundredth" has the alternative title of "The One With The Triplet".

Filming

The Greenwich Village building, 90 Bedford Street, used as the friends' apartment block in establishing shots
The first season was shot on Stage 5 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California.[69] NBC executives had worried that the coffee house setting was too hip and asked for the series to be set in a diner, but eventually consented to the coffee house concept.[49] The opening title sequence was filmed in a fountain at the Warner Bros. Ranch at 4:00 am, while it was particularly cold for a Burbank morning.[70] At the beginning of the second season, production moved to the larger Stage 24, which was renamed The "Friends" Stage after the series finale.[71]
Filming for the series began during the summer of 1994 in front of a live audience, who were given a summary of the series to familiarize themselves with the six main characters.[49] A hired comedian entertained the studio audience between takes.[33] Each 22-minute episode took six hours to film—twice the length of most sitcom tapings—mainly due to the several retakes and rewrites of the script.[33]
Although the producers always wanted to find the right stories to take advantage of being on location, Friends was never shot in New York. Bright felt that filming outside the studio made episodes less funny, even when shooting on the lot outside, and that the live audience was an integral part of the series.[58] When the series was criticized for incorrectly depicting New York, with the financially struggling group of friends being able to afford huge apartments, Bright noted that the set had to be big enough for the cameras, lighting, and "for the audience to be able to see what's going on".[58] The apartments also needed to provide a place for the actors to execute the actions in the scripts.[58]
The fourth-season finale was shot on location in London because the producers were aware of the series' popularity in the UK.[58] The scenes were shot in a studio with three audiences each made up of 500 people. These were the show's largest audiences throughout its run. The fifth-season finale, set in Las Vegas, was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios, although Bright met people who thought it was filmed on location.[72]