[from US, 10/99]

Will they be there for us?

We've been there for them, through their hapless romances and perpetually stalled careers, through a hundred renditions of "Smelly Cat" and five seasons' worth of hair cuts--good and bad. We stuck with them even during their third season, when, frankly, they kind of sucked (maybe because it took a lot of energy to make all those bad movies). And when Joey moved out on Chandler for a few episodes, who stuck with him? We did!

And all we ask is a little loyalty in return, damn it--which is more than we got from Seinfeld, though we always expected those self-absorbed twits and whiners to desert us whenever they chose to move on in life. (And where exactly did they move to, by the way? Is anyone lining up for the new Michael Richards movie?) But not Phoebe, Rachel, Ross and the rest of them, who are so supportive, so affectionate, so touchingly vulnerable yet, somehow, staunch that we want them around forever. We want to grow old with them--actually , we want them to stay the same age until we die. Isn't that what friends are for?

Well, yes, but last month as they prepared for their sixth season in the world's least convincing replica of a Greenwich Village apartment, a cloud hung over the future of the anti-Seinfeld, the show about...whatever. Rumors swirled that NBC would balk at paying Warner's reported $5 million-an-episode price to renew past this season, that David Schwimmer wanted to leave, that all of the women wanted to leave, that the stars were demanding a raise that would roughly double their salary to $250,000 each per episode. Executive producer Kevin Bright insists that none of the stars has said anything to him about wanting out. But in the spring, he announced a goal of signing everyone up for a seventh season before beginning work on the current one, and ominously, it didn't happen. "Everybody's individual schedules with starting movies and all that other stuff, made it too complicated to sit down and have a reasonable talk," Bright explains. Well, excuse me--did he say "individual"? That is so not the spirit of the show. I mean, I thought we were all friends here!

They were all together in June, of course, for Courteney Cox's wedding to David Arquette at San Fransisco's Grace Cathedral. Cox--at 35, eight years older than Arquette--met her husband on the set of Scream. And they rallied around Lisa Kudrow for the birth of her son, Julian, last year. Matt LeBlanc, living his life against type, even offered to baby-sit. LeBlanc's engagement to actress Melissa McKnight put an end to one distraction for him, but substantiated another: her two young children--Tyler, 8, and Jacqueline, 4. And Jennifer Aniston got a new boyfriend--some guy named Brad. Aniston and her beau socialize with LeBlanc and his fiancee. But the cast no longer parties after every week's wrap or assembles on Thursday nights to watch the show. "The getting-together thing isn't happening the way it used to," Bright admits. "They have other obligations."

But the getting-together thing was the very source of their strength. Their friendship made them feel they were in it together--an ensemble rather than six actors thrown together for a season's work. "We're not stupid," Kudrow once confided to a writer. "We all knew that the success of the show depended on us seeming like friends, so we became friends."

NBC senior vice president Karey Burke recalls, "From the beginning, they traveled in a pack. There's always been a sense that these people really like each other and are rooting for each other's success."

As the rocket ship of their celebrity gathered speed in that incredible second season, they clung ever more tightly to one another. "None of this has ever happened to us before," said Marta Kauffman, one of the two creators of Friends. "We're like kids in a candy store." There were the Coke ads, the milk endorsements, the Microsoft promotion deal. Aniston's hairstyle was a phenomenon unlike anything seen in America since Farrah Fawcett's. Then there was the 1996 post-Super Bowl special with Julia Roberts, which prompted Newsweek to proclaim an official start to the backlash. "If you read magazines, you simply cannot escape them, the Gang of Six, the Manhattanite Monkees, promoting themselves and their most excellent coifs," the Boston Globe sniped--which was true, but it overlooked the fact that much of the self-promotion was at the behest of writers who would dangle babies out of high windows and threaten to drop them unless they got an interview. "When you go through something that intense, the others in the group are the only ones who can ever understand it," says David Wild, author of Friends: The Official Companion. "The Beatles said the same thing."

The crucial moment came in the summer of 1996 when the actors got together to demand their first raise--and, equally important, that they all be paid the same. "David Schwimmer seemed to be taking the lead in saying, 'We negotiate together; we stick up for one another,' " recounts Wild. The point seems obvious now, but back then it was taken for granted that some of the actors had been hired for more money than others--presumably Cox, who was coming off her role as Jim Carrey's leading lady in Ace Ventura.

At first, Cox's character, Monica was written as "sort of the mom of the group," Bright says, making her the first among not-quite-equals. "Of course, the show has a center," James Burrows, who directed most of the early episodes, once said. "Courteney is the center. She's so pretty and looks so great on television that the audience gravitates to her."

But the show evolved in a different direction, as Monica imperceptibly descended to the jaunty post-adolescent level of the others. The cast's (and writers') finest achievement is how they have kept the characters in balance for five seasons. Kudrow's Phoebe might easily have dithered into irrelevance and disappeared if they hadn't made the effort to keep the character fresh; Matthew Perry (Chandler) could have hijacked the show with his manic energy and wit, but he held himself (or was held) in check; LeBlanc (Joey) was allowed to grow into a role that evolved from crude, oversexed lout to crude, oversexed sweetheart. "I can honestly say the whole time I was there, I never saw an awkward moment, a temper tantrum or anybody being difficult," says Tom Selleck, who guest-starred on the show for six episodes.

Which is why we love you guys exactly as you are, and want you to keep going forever! The show may be on TV forever in syndication, but we can't relate to the characters in the same way. (Although perhaps the cast can: About 6 million people watch the show in syndication every week, and from that, the Friends get residuals that should keep them in the black for a lifetime.) This year, Aniston and Perry, the two youngest cast members, turned 30, the age at which Dustin Hoffman made The Graduate. How much longer do they want to keep making pee jokes? And even though last season's finale featured Ross and Rachel spontaneously getting hitched, will the exploration of more grown-up stories be enough? The Friends may be linked by a tremendous amount of affection and mutual respect, but, let's face it, with so much more at stake, even the British royal family couldn't keep it together.

It's also possible they've found their professional level right here, on the sofa at Central Perk. Except for Kudrow's role in 1998's The Opposite of Sex, nothing they've done in movies so far suggests they've been wasting their talent on a sitcom. Probably some of them will make very good movie actors, but they have discovered, like countless TV stars before them, that you can't just transplant your fame from one medium to another. "The audience," says Don Ross, who directed Kudrow in The Opposite of Sex, "wants to see the same character they see at home, but then gets bored when they do." And TV actors don't necessarily get the choicest roles. "When these first movie offers came along," Perry said, "it was just a big deal that we were getting the offers. We didn't think about what movies they were." But now they're wiser, and without having to fit in movies around a grueling weekly schedule, isn't it possible that one could emerge as the next Demi Moore, only smarter, or a Woody Harrelson for the 21st century, only nicer?

It will only take one. They have said they won't renew except as a group, and we wouldn't want them to, anyway, if it meant, say, some hoked-up story line about Chandler's becoming a monk. Who will be the one to jump?

Kudrow, 36, has probably been the smartest in managing her film career. A biology major at Vassar College, she proved she could play adorable in Romy and Michele's High School Reunion and Analyze This. Cast against type as a dowdy schoolteacher in The Opposite of Sex, she received an award for best supporting actress from the New York Film Critics. "You don't usually find a TV star doing revealing, vulnerable roles," says Roos. "I value her courage." And with each film, she ups the ante. This Christmas she'll star with Diane Keaton and Meg Ryan in Hanging Up, a comedy-drama based on the life of Nora Ephron and her sisters.

Cox, 35, the candy-lover of the group (she prefers Butterfingers) has had kind of a one-note movie career since joining the cast; luckily for her, the note was Scream. Presumably she could play Gale Weathers for as many sequels as Scream is worth; presumably she has other ambitions for her future.

Aniston, 30, keeps turning out pleasant performances in such less riveting movies as Picture Perfect and Office Space. Probably it's not her fault, although there's something almost too appealing about her--the cute little way she scrunches up her face that reminds us, inevitably, of Mary Tyler Moore. She's our top candidate to spin off her own series, but the world expects more of her if she's going to marry some guy named Brad.

For his first big time movie, Schwimmer, 32, chose to take a part opposite a corpse. Reviews of The Pallbearer, a 1996 coming-of-age comedy, would have set any ordinary TV actor's career back to high school. The film's director, Matt Reeves, describes Schwimmer as "an unconventional leading man; he's got those sad, puppy-dog eyes, yet he's got this edge to him." Let's make a list of all the unconventionally handsome leading men we can think of. Done so soon? Schwimmer's rebuilding his film career in supporting roles, like last year's Six Days, Seven Nights, which film critic Leonard Maltin thinks is a smart move for him, because "no one blames you if you're a supporting actor."

LeBlanc, 32, is starting to live down his movie debut, opposite a monkey, although 100 years from now, network executives will be showing Ed to restless sitcom stars at contract time. He made a better choice with 1998's Lost in Space, but the former Levi's 501 model is probably the least likely candidate to throw off the oppressive chains of TV stardom.

Perry, 30, who has overcome the addiction to painkillers that led to his spending the summer of 1997 in rehab, is going to have a great career in movies. Everyone says so. Maybe not everyone who saw him in Fools Rush In, but luckily he hasn't had many movie roles like that. He has "a really unexpectedly wide range," says Damon Santostefano, who directed Perry in this month's comedy Three to Tango. "He's very sensitive and intuitive as a dramatic actor, and he can turn on a dime and be extremely funny verbally and physically. Those are acting muscles that a lot of people haven't seen, but they exist."

We have to ask ourselves, is it really fair that Perry postpone his destiny just because we don't want to let him go? Aren't we behaving just a little bit selfishly here? OK, yeah. But we're thinking about them, too. Do they really want to give up the security of their tight little group of friends for the brutal, ego-smashing Hollywood film world? Has Cox forgotten what it was like trying to say a line opposite Carrey? You want to talk about destiny? Think about this: Just before the call came for Friends, Perry, who is also a writer, was developing a sitcom about a group of twentysomethings who get together to talk, tell a few jokes, and occasionally fall in love. He called it Maxwell's House, and he had a studio interested. But when it came time to show it to NBC, the network declined. "They said they already had something like it," Perry recalled.

We know what that something was, of course. So, it's not that we want to hold you back, guys. Do what's best for your career, for your life, and remember, on Thursday nights, we'll be there for you even if you're not.

by Dana C. Topping