THE NEWS!

FEBRUARY, 13, 2002:
RIGHT FROM ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S EW.COM, THE HOTTEST NEWS!!

"'FRIENDS' AGAIN The cast of NBC's most popular sitcom return for their ninth season!

TUBE TALK At last, you and millions of fellow fans (and NBC entertainment chief Jeff Zucker) can sleep peacefully, as the six stars of ''Friends'' have ended months of speculation and agreed to return for a ninth season, in return for a 33 percent pay raise. According to Variety and the Wall Street Journal, each Friend's per-episode take will rise from $750,000 to just above $1 million. That'll boost the Warner Bros.-produced half hour's annual cost to more than $150 million, and only part of that will be covered by the license fee that NBC pays for each show, which the Journal reports will rise from $5.5 million to just over $6 million. Still, the show remains the most popular series in prime time and is expected to generate $1 billion in syndication revenue for Warner Bros. and surpass ''Seinfeld'' as the most lucrative sitcom in history. ''We are enormously pleased and excited to be returning for a ninth season,'' the actors said in a joint statement. ''We could not ignore the outpouring of public support for the show.''
Still, the ninth season is expected to be the series' last. ''Since we all had the same objective, this was the easiest deal we have ever made,'' Zucker told the Associated Press. ''Everyone wanted it to work out, because everyone wanted to be able to send the series out appropriately, and in style.'' Series creators Kevin Bright, Marta Kauffman and David Crane said they would spend the year tying up loose plot ends in order to ''send our characters off into the world.''
Guess that means those rumors that this season would end with Rachel dying in childbirth and handing the tot over to Monica and Chandler to raise were premature. That was one possible storyline being considered for the season finale, according to the tabloid The Star; others had Rachel marrying Ross or Joey. ''When I asked about the story line, everyone [among the producers] looked at me like I was crazy,'' series spokesman Phil Gonzalez told AP. ''It's definitely not true.'' But Star editor-in-chief Tony Frost insisted that well-placed sources had told his paper that such storylines had been under consideration. ''I suppose now that the Star has let the cat out of the bag, the writers will have to put their thinking caps back on,'' he told AP. Indeed, until yesterday, the writers didn't know if they'd be writing a season finale or a series finale, so just about anything could have happened to the characters. Now, at least, they know they're not writing a funeral...."

Great news, isn't it?