Kelsey Miller - I'll Be There For You

Bright asked if he could have an hour to turn something around. He called the music editor and asked her to cut together a forty-five-second version of REM’s “Shiny Happy People,” using only the chorus. “And then I said to the editor, ‘I want you to scan through the show, and I’m just gonna say stop. Whatever image we stop on, pull that image.’” One hour later, they sent back the pilot with this cobbled-together compilation of screen grabs and REM. They didn’t cut a single moment of the actual show, but forty-five seconds of pop music was good enough for Ohlmeyer.

After several rounds of testing the pilot with audiences, NBC’s attitude about the show was one of hesitant glee. It didn’t test well, but testing is a notoriously unreliable diagnostic—and, internally, everyone could see there was something good and exciting here. So the network decided to take a gamble. They called the cocreators and told them they were giving the show the 8:30 slot on Thursday nights, placed right in between Mad About You and Seinfeld . In 1994, there was literally no more prime spot in prime-time television. There was just one final note: the network wanted to change the title again, and simply call it Friends . Bright’s response: “If you put us on Thursday nights, you can call us Kevorkian for all I care.”

Everything that came next is, without a doubt, a success story—if not a straightforward one. It took a fortuitous blend of talent, left turns, and elbow grease just to get the show up to this, its starting point. All that is thanks, almost entirely, to the wisdom and relentless work of Marta Kauffman, David Crane, and Kevin Bright—with the support (and occasional roadblocks) of numerous collaborators and one incredibly powerful television network. But if there was a magic formula to Friends that launched the show from a promising but tepid pilot into a stratospheric hit, then the final key ingredient was the cast. On its own, the show is good—exceptionally so. But, as David Schwimmer realized the first day he came to work and met his five new counterparts, “the miracle is the casting.”

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