show, and first major flop: Family Album. It was one of two series they developed during their first year with Warner Bros., the other being Couples—a single-camera comedy about three couples living in the same apartment in New York City. That show, they said, was the obvious winner. It flowed right out of them, Crane recalled: “We wrote it in, like, a week! We love it… It’s smart, it’s single-camera, it’s got everything we want.” Family Album, on the other hand, was multicamera, family-focused, and in terms of writing, “[like] pulling teeth.” No one wanted a show like Couples, no matter how good it was. They wanted, as one network executive told them, “a white-collar Roseanne.”
Backed into the living-room corner, they did their best. “We did everything right. We drew on our own lives. It was about this family from Philadelphia. We had characters based on our parents…and yet, for some reason, the DNA was wrong, and it was incredibly hard to write.” Still, Couples was passed over,3 while Family Album was picked up and ran on CBS. For six weeks.
Family Album was no one’s dream project, but its cancellation was still a blow. “Around that point we were feeling not so much like the cable wunderkinds anymore,” recalled Bright. “We were more like the cable disappointment.” Dream On had been a hit, but one hit (and a surprise niche hit at that) is a meager track record. “It was interesting to us how fast the hype about you can change. ‘Golden children, eh. You’re golden children with tarnish now.’”
That same year, The Powers That Be, a show that Kauffman and Crane had created (but hadn’t run) for Norman Lear was canceled, too. While they’d hardly written a word of it beyond the pilot episode, they were still credited creators, and thus now had another failure with their name on it.
Back to the drawing board, again. Sitting in their office at Warner Bros., the three ex–New Yorkers started thinking back to the days before they came out to Hollywood, when they were just out of college and a little lost—but not alone. Kauffman and Crane thought about their old friends from the theater days, and how they’d banded together as a makeshift family, in those years before they’d made their own families, before careers had taken shape, and adult life was still amorphous. “We were looking at that time when the future was more of a question mark. Maybe ’cause that’s what we were feeling in that moment,” said Kauffman. Maybe there was something there. After all, she thought, “everybody knows that feeling.”
Weeks later, it was done. Kauffman and Crane delivered a seven-page pitch for a show they titled Insomnia Café.4
“This show is about six people in their twenties who hang out at this coffeehouse,” they wrote. “It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers…a time in your life when everything is possible, which is really exciting and really scary.”
The following pages went on to describe potential storylines and character sketches—all drawn from friends in their social circle back in New York, with a little bit of their twentysomething selves thrown in. But ultimately, it was that single and incredibly simple concept that sold the show: “It’s about friendship, because when you’re young and single in the city, your friends are your family.” It was straightforward and endearing, and in 1994, it was exactly what NBC was looking for.
“We wanted to reach that young, urban audience, those kids starting out on their own,” remembered Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC Entertainment, in his 2012 book, Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV. He’d been studying the ratings one morning, reviewing numbers in the major markets—New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Saint Louis. “I found myself thinking about the people in those cities, particularly the twentysomethings just beginning to make their way… It was very expensive to live in those places as well as a tough emotional journey. It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend.” He’d been hunting for a Friends-esque concept ever since, “but none of the contenders had ever lived up to our hopes.” Then Kauffman and Crane showed up.
In the historic pilot season of 1994, their pitch remains legendary. “The pitch was like two old friends telling you a story. The jokes were already there,” added Karey Burke, who was an NBC executive at the time. “It was theater.”
It’s a testament to just how good the pair was at pitching that it was such an easy sell. Because, beyond that famous log line and the six character sketches, they really didn’t have much else—including a plot or even a solid premise, according to Crane. “I remember pitching it and we were saying, ‘Yeah, and basically we’re just in their lives. And here are the six characters, and they’re specific. But yeah, we’re in and out of their apartments and they go about doing stuff. That’s your show.’”
NBC bought it—not only a script, but a pilot, as well. At the very least, this would not be another idea sold, bought, and left unproduced. The show’s title was changed from Insomnia Café to Friends Like Us,5 and Kauffman and Crane sat down to write. In three days flat, the script was done. As with Couples, the writing came easily and it came out good. But Couples had also been a great pilot that went bust, so they wrote this first script with the understanding that it most likely would be the last. “At the point where you’re doing pilots,” said Crane, “you don’t think you’re going to spend the next ten years of your life doing this.” No one was all that worried about answering questions like: If Monica is a chef, then why is she home for dinner every night? Why doesn’t anyone lock their doors in this downtown Manhattan apartment building (except when someone is locked out for storyline purposes)? How the hell did a recently homeless, evolution denialist, aura-cleansing weirdo like Phoebe wind up hanging out with these bourgeois squares? As Crane pointed out, at this stage of the process, it just doesn’t matter much because, in all likelihood, your show won’t survive long enough to answer these questions. “We had absolutely no idea what this show was going to be. For us, it was just another pilot. We’d just had a series canceled. We were thinking we’d never work again, so we were scrambling… [It] was feeling good, but it was just another pilot. Or it was just another pilot until Jimmy Burrows wants to direct it. Excuse me, James Burrows.”
If you’ve watched any network television programming since 1975, then James Burrows is a name you’ve likely seen thousands of times, but never noticed. He is a director and producer, who has worked on shows including but not limited to: Taxi, Cheers, Wings, Will & Grace, Frasier, Dharma & Greg, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and NewsRadio. As Littlefield describes him in Top of the Rock, Burrows is “the most successful director in television comedy—ever.” After reading Kauffman and Crane’s pilot script, Littlefield called him up. “I literally had no time,” Burrows later told the New York Times. “But I read it, and I said, ‘I can’t let anyone else do this.’” He agreed to direct the pilot, but nothing more.
With Burrows signed on, things got more serious. He embraced the loose, low-concept structure of the show, and later, when directing the pilot, would offer several crucial tweaks that made the show stand out. But even with a knockout script and the best television comedy director on board, some NBC executives still had serious “concerns” about the show.
First of all, everyone was too young. What about adding an older character? Someone who could pop in every now and again to give some sage advice to these young folks. Maybe it could be the guy who owned the coffeehouse—or a cop! “You know the children’s book Pat the Bunny? We had Pat the Cop,” said Kauffman. They would eventually write a script incorporating the character, and hated it so much that they called the network and begged them to can the idea, promising to incorporate the parents more or bump up older guest-star appearances. The network agreed. Then there was the issue of the coffeehouse. “You gotta remember what time it was,” said Kevin Bright. “Starbucks hadn’t really taken hold yet.” Neither had the mid-’90s trend of coffeehouse culture, complete with enormous mugs and
