Featured Image Credit: Instagram/Patty Lin. NBC
Topics: News, Friends, Film and TV
Charisa Bossinakis
While Friends followed six close pals living their best years in Manhattan, it turns out things weren’t so friendly behind the scenes.
That is, according to one of the former writers of the famous sitcom.
Patty Lin has revealed in her new memoir End Credits: How I Broke Up with Hollywood that working on Friends certainly wasn’t as picturesque as one might think.
Lin, who worked on Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad, got the call to work on the seventh season of Friends.
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The writer, who worked on the series from 2000 - 2001, says the opportunity was too good to pass up, especially as Lin had only worked in the industry for two years.
“My disillusionment [with the business] had begun at my very first writing job but was momentarily staved off by a positive experience at Freaks and Geeks,” Lin writes in her book, as per TIME.
She added that while she was incredibly excited to meet the famous cast, the novelty of big stars up close ‘wore off fast’.
“The actors seemed unhappy to be chained to a tired old show when they could be branching out, and I felt like they were constantly wondering how every given script would specifically serve them,” she writes.
Lin claims that when an actor didn’t like a joke, they would deliberately sabotage it, forcing the writers to rewrite.
She adds that ‘dozens of good jokes would get thrown out’ just because one of the actors would fluff the line or talk ‘through a mouthful of bacon'.
She reveals that after the first rewrite was finished, the cast and writers would hang around ‘Monica and Chandler’s apartment’ to discuss the script.
According to Lin, the actors never had any positive notes.
“This was the actors’ first opportunity to voice their opinions, which they did vociferously. They rarely had anything positive to say, and when they brought up problems, they didn’t suggest feasible solutions,” she writes.
“Seeing themselves as guardians of their characters, they often argued that they would never do or say such-and-such. That was occasionally helpful, but overall, these sessions had a dire, aggressive quality that lacked all the levity you’d expect from the making of a sitcom.”
Lin adds that out of the 14 writers, most of whom were men, she was the only minority, leading her to feel ‘imposter syndrome' on a daily basis.
“I didn’t learn that much, except that I never wanted to work on a sitcom again. But the choice had been clear at the time. And, for better or worse, Friends would remain my most recognizable credit,” she adds.