ON the screen, the cast of Friends weathers: the vagaries of twentysomething urban life with a cappuccino fuelled camaraderie. Sure, they have their obligatory spats; but it is rarely long before the heart warming bonhomie has been restored on the sofas of Monica and Rachel's Greenwich Village apartment. It's like the song says: "I'll be there for you".
Now, it seems, the stars of the transatlantic hit series have discovered the value of solidarity off screen, too. The six actors - Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Lisa Kudrow and Matt LeBlanc - are reportedly demanding a handsome new pay deal. If they don't get it, they are said to have vowed, they will down mugs as one. No more cash, no more Friends.
The advent of collective bar gaining in the off set saga of Friends is the latest twist in a rags to riches drama that has become every bit as gripping as the fictional fortunes of the Generation X sextet. Of the six cast members, only the anatomically blessed Courteney Cox had enjoyed any measure of success before the show, though her performance opposite Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective hardly brought the Hollywood offers flooding in.
Between them, the Friends cast had previously notched up no less than a dozen failed sitcoms. Jennifer Aniston's most notable performance was a bit part in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. The adorably angst ridden David Schwimmer had managed a well received cameo in NYPD Blue. Matt LeBlanc appeared in a few films you won't have heard of.
In the space of a few months, however, the giddy success of Friends turned them into the hottest thespian properties in America. Their pleasingly arranged features grinned from every magazine cover. (In the case of Aniston and Rolling Stone, it was not just the grinning features.) They got their own PAs and PRs. "The Rachel", named after Aniston's character, became the most requested haircut in American salons.
And the film offers flooded in: Schwimmer shook hands with Miramax and Aniston struck deals with both Fox and Paramount. Cox signed up with Universal. Any Friend of theirs had friends in Hollywood. "I had $11 when I auditioned for Friends," reflected LeBlanc a year after the show's launch. And now I own a home."
Now the world's most famous professional twentysomethings want more than their own homes, however. Specifically, they want $100,000 each (about £66,000) for every episode they make and a share of the show's stratospheric profits. Given the sitcom's rudely healthy ratings, their demands might be considered reasonable enough if it weren't for one fact - all six signed five-year contracts when they took the job - for $22,500 an episode.
Nevertheless, Schwimmer and Co wield no shortage of negotiating clout. Warner Brothers has reportedly sold syndication rights for a whopping $4 million an episode. But to make good on the deal, the studio needs to come up with at least two more seasons of the show.
That could be costly if the cast's newfound solidarity holds. Asked recently if Friends could survive the loss of any of its regulars, co writer and coproducer David Crane said: "I think the show would survive if we lost a Friend or two, or if we had to replace them. If Cheers could survive Shelley long leaving, Friends could certainly carry on." But "a Friend or two" is different from two, so fas full, and losing even two, as Lady Bracknell might have pointed out would look decidedly careless.
THE prospect of industrial action on the Friends set is a far cry from the sighs of delight that greeted the shows, US launch in the autumn of 1994 and echoed across these islands a few months later. Here at last was a show that presented Gen-Xers as warm, wannabe achievers instead of nihilistic slackers. In place of the plastic beauties of Melrose Place, it featured characters that any middle class twentysomething could relate to Ross, the loveable but accident prone palaeontologist, Monica, the stunning perpetual job hunter; Joey, the gorgeous but dim wannabe actor.
The gags were sharp and the story lines warming. We were not forced to suffer a Moonlighting style eternity before Ross and Rachel got it together. And these Friends were easy on the eye. In a million bars and classrooms, the debate raged: who was sexier? Rachel or Monica? Joey or Ross? Even Phoebe's excruciating folk songs - "Smelly cat, smelly cat/What are they feeding you?" - acquired something close to cult status.
Within months the American airwaves were crowded with Friends clones. Partners featured a group of twentysomething architects, grappling with the marriage of one of their number. The Single Guy featured a group of married twentysomethings. Dweebs touted Friends with a technological bent. But none could replicate the ratings magic of the original.
With an audience drawn squarely from the so called "dream demographic" of 18 to 34 year olds, Friends was particularly popular with advertisers. Following January's Superbowl, NBC aired an unprecedented Friends special sprinkled with Diet Coke ads featuring the cast members. Coca Cola reportedly paid between $5 million and $10 million for the privilege - cheap, most advertising analysts agreed, at the price.
The Superbowl special marked the peak of Friends mania in the US. The producers flexed their newly acquired Hollywood muscle by packing it with cameo appearances by Brooke Shields, Jean Claude Van Damme and Julia Roberts. (To the delight of the show's 30 million or so viewers and a legion of PRs, Roberts was subsequently reported to have forged closer ties with Matthew Perry, the Porsche driving tennis enthusiast who plays Chandler.)
Predictably, the rumblings of, a backlash were not far away. Perhaps it was Hallmark's decision to launch a series of Friends greeting cards ("May the only tall, dark and rich part" of your day not be a double espresso!"); or perhaps it was the Friends cookbook that didit; but by February the "O" word was on everyone's lips. Even NBC's president of entertainment, Warren Littlefield, was using it: "There is the possibility of the show being overexposed," he ventured. NBC would see to it that the Friends were soon a little less ubiquitous.
At the same time, mean spirited types were complaining more loudly that Friends was - too white, too facile, too lookist. Where were the challenging - story lines that Steven Bochco had crowbarred into American television? Where were the minority cast members to reflect America's ethnic mosaic? "I'd like y'all to get a black friend," Oprah Winfrey told the cast when they appeared en masse on her show. "Maybe I could stop by." And then there was that damn theme tune. Enough already.
The biggest blow to the Friends boom may have been delivered by the lamentable performances of their various big screen offerings, however. LeBlanc's Ed, a cringy saga of a minor league baseball player and a chimp, bombed roundly. Schwimmer's heavily promoted The Pall Bearer headed south too - beyond rescue even by Gwynneth Paltrow, Hollywood's femme du jour.
Instead of earnestly reporting the dramatic ambitions of the Friends stars, the papers now speculate about whether they are suffering from a "Caruso complex", a less than flattering reference to the NYPD Blue star, David Caruso, who left the hit show to make his name in Hollywood - and failed dismally.
Ironically, however, it may be their newfound awareness of the ephemeral nature of sitcom celebrity that is driving the Friends stars' pay demands. After all, you've got to grab it while you can.
As Schwimmer put it recently: "There's some madman with a spotlight in the sky who's random about where it falls, and just as quickly as it has fallen on to you, it could move on to somebody else."