Pilot episode (Friends)

Four friends ( Monica Geller , Chandler Bing , Joey Tribbiani and Phoebe Buffe ) are sitting in Central Coffee Shop and discussing Monica’s new boyfriend, with whom she is going to “have dinner”. Then Chandler tells his dream, in which he stands completely naked in the school cafeteria, and below his belt he has a telephone . The phone rings, Chandler picks up the phone and it turns out that this is his mother. “A terribly strange dream: she never calls me,” he ends his story.

A little later, Ross Geller appears in a coffee shop in a depressed state - recently his wife, Carol , who turned out to be a lesbian , left him. Friends are trying to console him.

A girl in a wedding dress runs into the Central Coffee Shop, in which Monica recognizes her school friend, Rachel Green . She introduces her to all her friends. Rachel says that she left her fiancé, Barry , right at the altar, realizing that she does not love him and does not want to connect life with him.

In the next scene, friends are sitting in Monica’s apartment and watching a Spanish television series (without translation), trying to guess what the characters are talking about. Rachel is talking to her father on the phone. She tells him that she does not want to marry Barry and wants to start a new life, remaining to live with Monica.

At the moment when Rachel’s friends are comforting, Paul arrives, Monica’s new friend, with whom she was going to have dinner. Ross invites Rachel not to be alone and go with him, Chandler and Joey to help collect furniture in his new apartment. She refuses. Phoebe too.

In the next frame, Phoebe plays the guitar and sings in the subway . At this time, the guys in Ross's apartment are trying to figure out how to properly assemble furniture. Ross once again indulges in the memories of Carol and friends in every possible way try to console him.

At the restaurant, Paul tells Monica about his failed marriage. At the same time, Rachel is trying to apologize to Barry over the phone.

Joey and Chandler continue to console Ross, who thought that perhaps "only one woman is destined for everyone in life," and that he lost her. Paul confesses to Monica that after a divorce he has not been able to make love for several years.

The next morning, Rachel treats the guys to the coffee that she made for the first time in her life (and which is impossible to drink). Monica comes out of the room and it turns out that she spent that night with Paul. Rachel discovers that all friends are working: Monica is a cook , Chandler “enters data into a computer”, and Joey is an actor . Monica recalls that Joey "excellent" played the role of Pinocchio in one of the plays, Chandler teases Joey.

At work, Monica tells her colleague about Paul. It turns out that she is not the first whom Paul misled by his story about "that he does not succeed in bed." In the evening, Monica tells friends about this. Joey admires Paul's ingenuity.

Rachel returns with her father’s purchases, singing a song:“ I do not need friends, enemies, I do not need relatives! When such boots on my legs! " - she bought boots from Gucci . Friends convince her of the need to refuse this money (cutting credit cards ) in order to start an independent life.

After gatherings in Monica’s apartment it’s too late and friends disperse. Rachel finds Paul’s watch and Monica steps on it as if by chance, going to bed. Ross is left alone with Rachel and admits that in college he was in love with her. It turns out that Rachel knew about it. Ross asks how she will react if he “someday invites her somewhere” and she replies “Why not.” Ross goes home happy.

In the final shots, Rachel serves friends coffee in Central Coffee House, and Chandler is going to tell his next dream: “ I'm in Las Vegas . I am Lisa Minnelli ... ”

• Clea Lewis - Franny, partner of Monica;
• John Allen Nelson - Paul, Monica's Boyfriend;
• Cynthia Mann is a waitress at the Central Coffee Shop.

Project writers David Crane and Martha Kaufman first worked in the television industry on Dream On. The team’s second collaborative series is Family Album (on CBS in the fall of 1993), but six episodes were later removed from the broadcast. ^[4] In November 1993, they began work on three new projects in their television offices, one of which is the television series.

“This series is dedicated to sex, love, relationships, careers, when everything in your life is possible, about friendship at the same time, because if you are left alone in the city, your friends will be your family” - an advertising statement by Crane-Kauffman -Bright, which they used to represent the NBC project ^[5] .

NBC bought a pilot script. Kauffman interviewed 20-year-old people to get an idea of ​​what the characteristics and behavior of the characters should look like ^[4] . They wrote a screenplay with Crane in a day ^[6] . Burroughs liked everything in the original script, except that Joey, who had similar characteristics to Chandler, had to be turned into a more stupid character ^[4] .

A preliminary version of the script is entitled “Insomnia Cafe” (Cafe “Insomnia”). The subsequent trial names are “Friends Like Us” and “Six of One” - a pun for the English proverb “Six of one, half a dozen of the other,” literally translated like “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” An approximate Russian analogue is “What's on the forehead, what's on the forehead”). The final version of the name - "Friends" was approved along with the script.

Casting

There were about 1000 actors at the casting, but only 75 actors were invited to read the script with the director.

David Schwimmer was the first to be approved. ^[1] He was in Chicago playing Master and Margarita when his agent offered him an audition. He was not interested in doing television after a poor experience at Monty, but later changed his mind ^[7] . Eric McCormack also auditioned for this role several times, but he was not approved.

Courtney Cox was the most famous actor of the six main actors at the time of filming. She was considered for Rachel, but Cox read the script and thought that she was better suited for the role of Monica. ^[7] Nancy McKeon auditioned for this role. According to the original script, Monica was supposed to make a love couple with Joey (in the series there are several episodes on this subject).

Jennifer Aniston got the role of Rachel, although she was originally considered for the role of Monica. Her contract with another series (Eng. “Muddling Through”) meant that any role in “Friends” would be in second position, and later her role would have to be rewritten or would require a change of actor ^[8] . Because of this, CBS did not plan to broadcast the show until mid-1994. However, Aniston won the role because NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield correctly predicted that “Muddling Through” would fail. ^[9]

Crane and Kaufman wanted Joey to be “a guy who loves women, sports, women, New York and women.” Actors for the role were tested with a scene from the pilot series “grab a spoon” (in Ross’s apartment). Many of them considered an unbuttoned shirt to show their breasts as a good find for the image. Matt LeBlanc simply repeated the image of his character from the movie “ Vinnie and Bobby ” (Eng. “Vinnie and Bobby”) ^[10] , since Joey’s character didn’t reveal much in the script, he used his role as a “good Italian” from “Winnie and Bobby” " ^[7] . Matt had about eight auditions. ^[7]

Initially, the roles of Chandler and Phoebe were not considered by the authors as the main characters and were secondary. Both of them were designed to entertain the viewer, shading the main characters - Monica and Joey , Ross and Rachel . Matthew Perry described Chandler in the pilot scenario as "observing other people's lives." He became part of the main group by the time the casting was already over. Crane described Chandler as a “callous guy,” and thought it would be easy to find one, but it turned out to be more difficult ^[10] . Perry had previously worked with Kauffman and Crane on Dream On, and asked for an audition. He was rejected due to his participation in LAX 2194. After the producers of "Friends" saw "LAX 2194", it became clear to them that the series would fail, and Perry received an audition ^[7] . Before Perry was selected, Craig Birko auditioned for the role and was the first choice for this role. Birko was a friend of Perry and Perry invited him to an audition to help him get to know Chandler's character. According to the authors, the role of Chandler could be non-traditional sexual orientation, and in many episodes there are jokes about his alleged latent homosexuality .

Actresses, auditioned for the role of Phoebe , came to the casting in the image of "with bells on the hem, bulky shoes and with nose rings." The producers chose Lisa Kudrow for this role, because they liked her in the image of Ursula Buffet in the sitcom “Mad About You” (English “Mad About You”). About the role of Lisa in this sitcom, there are a couple of jokes in the episode of the first season of “Friends” - “The One With the Two Parts”. ^[10] She was chosen one month after Schwimmer. ^[7]

Six characters first met at the audition on April 28, 1994 ^[11] .

Shooting

On May 2, two days before filming, a dress rehearsal took place. Several NBC leaders watched the rehearsal and worried that Monica didn't care that Paul slept with her on a first date. NBC West Coast President Don Olmeyer believed that the audience would perceive her as a “whore” ^[7] . The series executives agreed and interviewed other people who watched the rehearsal to support their position. However, they had to rewrite the replicas of Monica to show that she was still worried. NBC also wanted to remove the scene, which implied that the supposedly impotent Paul was getting an erection , as this would violate network standards. Crane and Kauffman rewrote the scene and found that the new version made the scene “smart and subtle.”

The final draft of the script was completed on May 3 ^[2] .

The episode was recorded on May 4 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California ^[2] . A total of eight hours of material was filmed (two hours from each of the four cameras), which was edited up to 22 minutes under Bright's supervision ^[2] . Bright introduced him to NBC on May 10, 72 hours before the fall schedule was announced. NBC ordered Bright to make additional changes, which he completed at 1 am on May 11 ^[12] . After announcing the start of work on the remaining 12 episodes, Krain and Kaufman immediately began to receive phone calls from agents who wanted to get their clients to work on the series ^[12] .

Schwimmer recalls how he enjoys the physical humor associated with Ross (his clumsiness and facial expressions), especially with the scene where Ross greets Rachel and opens an umbrella in front of her ^[7] .

This episode was first broadcast on NBC on September 22, 1994 from 20:30 to 21:00 ^[13] . It was rated as the fifteenth most visited television show of the week, ranking 14.7 out of 23 in the Nielsen rating and 21.5 million viewers ^{[14] [15]} .

The pilot series took 90th place in the ranking of all 236 episodes of the series ^[3] .

Critics compared the episode to Seinfeld and Ellen : Tom Feren from The Plain Dealer wrote: “ vaguely and less successfully in the Seinfeld party style ” ^[16] , and Anne Hodges of the Houston Chronicle called it “a new fake” Seinfield, "but he will never be as funny as Seinfield." Even now when Seinfield is not as funny as before . ” ^[17] Robert Bianco in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that “the constant banter is a little tiring as if it really happened in real life, ” and questioned why the six characters had so much free time to talk about dating ^{[18 ]} . In the Los Angeles Daily News, Ray Richmond, who also saw the next two episodes, noted that although Friends was “one of the bright comedies of the new season,” Pilot was “very weak” ^[19] .

Diane Holloway from Ameriken State Austin writes: “ What is so specific about a guy who sees in his dream that his penis is a telephone? She called the scene where Monica discovers Paul’s invented impotence as the least funny part of the episode, although she acknowledged that the episode as a whole did have some funny moments ^[20] . Robert P. Lawrence wrote in the San Diego Union Tribune that “a lot of things are happening, but you all feel like you've seen it before,” calling it “ Seinfeld plus two. Or " Ellen, plus five. " ^[21]

Tony Scott from Variety pinned optimistic hopes on the series, but was worried that Monica’s plot would serve as a bad example for younger viewers: “ Friends advertise promiscuous sex and offer liberal patterns of openness that borders on emptiness .” He singled out Cox and Schwimmer as the best actors of the ensemble ^[13] .

Robert Bianco was pleased with Schwimmer, calling him "terrific." He also praised the female characters, but wrote that Perry’s role as Chandler was “uncertain” and that LeBlanc “ relied too much on the same moronic habit that he was tired of the last two times when he tried it ” ^[18] .

Entertainment Weekly evaluates the episode in B + and states that “ after 22 minutes, these six people sit as longtime buddies .” Ross’s remark: “ Do the words“ Billy not be a hero ”mean anything to you? ”Stands out as the best phrase of the episode ^[22] .

The episode was sold to several channels simultaneously for the first time on September 21, 1998 . Several deleted scenes were restored in the pilot series, resulting in its total operating time reached 37 minutes. He received a rating of 5.8 out of 10, averaged over 40 stations. This made “Friends” the third best sitcom aired after “ Big Repair ” and “ Seenfield” ^[23] .