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Lisa Kudrow says that the show that skyrocketed her to fame would look a lot different if it were filmed in 2020. The actress opened up about her time on Friends in an interview with The Sunday Times yesterday, and she admitted that the NBC sitcom lacked diversity in its main cast, Entertainment Weekly reports.
Friends is set in one of the most-populated cities in America, New York City, but the cast of the show was all white and the friends rarely interacted with people of color. Kudrow didn’t deny the lack of representation in the main cast, but added that it would be a totally different set of characters if the show was still in production today. “It’d be completely different. It would not be an all-white cast, for sure,” she said. Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay on Friends from its first episode in 1994 to the series finale in 2004, added, “I’m not sure what else, but to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong.”
Although she said she hopes the series can be viewed as a “time capsule,” Kudrow also pointed out plot lines on Friends that she saw as examples of the show being ahead of its time, referring to Ross (David Schwimmer) raising a child with two women. “Also, this show thought it was very progressive,” she said. “There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant, and they raised the child together? We had surrogacy, too. It was, at the time, progressive.”
Schwimmer has also acknowledged the show’s lack of diversity in the past, and like Kudrow, he said he views the show as a progressive series for the era it represented. “The truth is also that show was groundbreaking in its time for the way in which it handled so casually sex, protected sex, gay marriage and relationships,” he told The Guardian earlier this year.
But, he also noted the lack of diversity, particularly when it came to his character’s dating life. “Maybe there should be an all-black Friends or an all-Asian Friends,” he said. “But I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of color. One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part.”
There are no plans in the works for a new, modern Friends reboot, but the cast is planning an eventual reunion that has been postponed due to the coronavirus. HBO Max, the new streaming home of Friends, is hoping to film the special this summer with a live studio audience.
