What's a little kiss between friends? In David Schwimmer's case, it's proof that a neurotic guy can get the girl.
By Gerri Hirshey.
Dodging four lanes of pitiless rush-hour traffic, a young woman shuffles across Sunset Boulevard in plastic pedicure slippers. Cotton balls separate her wet lacquered toes; she's carrying a pair of strappy platform sandals. "Gotta DATE!" she screams at a honking driver. "Gimme a break!" It's risky trolling for a relationship in the '90s, on either coast or in between. Who calls whom, and do beepers count? Do you flash that photocopy of your doctor's lab report after the cappuccino--or straightaway with the crawfish bisque? Few would deny the potential for big laughs in these mortifyingly PC times. And so it is that I have come to Los Angeles to investigate the pitfalls of being young, American and single, sitcom-style. Just over the Hollywood Hills, in a valley honeycombed with television sound- stages, a banquet of prime-time reality bites is being served up on no less than ten "Gee, ain't it a bitch being single, career impaired and urban?" network comedies. Even in a jumpy TV season that has set a record for the amount of new programming, it is an unprecedented clone-athon. And it clearly sprang from the success of Seinfeld, Ellen and last season's runaway hit, Friends.
Many of these young-and-unattached series field Seinfeld-like ensemble casts. Six are set in Manhattan, otherwise known as the deepest ring of Singles Hell; where 61 percent of the population over 25 is unmarried. Frantic set designers have been airlifting authentic Greek-coffee-shop takeout cups and copies of the New York Post. (In an eerie moment on the Friends set, I am destined to find a takeout menu for a Burmese joint I frequent on Amsterdam and 76th tacked to the wall of Chandler and Joey's apartment. )
Right now there is no mightier comedy engine than NBC's singles Thursday, a two-hour arc of bad dates and great hair. As it happens (though no one at NBC will say it was intentional), all of those shows--Friends, The Single Guy, Seinfeld and Caroline in the City--are set in Manhattan and shot in L.A. And here, shambling toward a busy Sunset java junction, is the NBC poster boy for "Sweet, Smart, but Can't Catch a Break With Babes." From a block away, I recognize David Schwimmer--Ross on Friends--by his walk. It's Ross's lope--big, work-booted feet anchoring the long, lean body; shoulders warily hunched, as though a potted geranium or a suicidal unwed tax attorney might come hurtling down on his unsuspecting noggin.
In the unsparing new world of what the TV development folks call "sophisticated adult comedy," Ross has taken some tough knocks. He's a museum paleontologist whose pregnant wife divorced him for her lesbian partner. He's a baby-smitten new dad who has to listen to his son's gleeful "other mommy" describe the taste of birth mommy's breast milk ("kinda like cantaloupe juice"). The capuchin monkey Ross adopted to counter the loneliness had to be sent to a zoo, owing to an unseemly testosterone surge (in truth the actors hated Marcel's cute, gibbering guts). As if that were not enough, Ross is afflicted with an unrequited case of the hots for his sister's friend and current apartment-mate, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston)--a condition that has persisted since their Clearasil days.
As 29-year-old Schwimmer plays him, Ross Geller is angsty, vulnerable and as cute as a wet retriever pup. Much of female America--especially those coveted 18- to 49-year-old free- spending, urban or fashionably suburban demographic dream gals--is ready to step up with a fluffy towel, a smooch and a soothing double latte. Schwimmer and his five fellow Friends have been besieged by all sorts of Gen X solidarity since the show took off last season and went on to dominate the 1995 Nielsen top four with ER, Seinfeld and Caroline in the City. The show's premise may not be new, but Friends possessed a young, very attractive cast, and it had a privileged infancy: a coveted time slot, in the wake of that comic Kohoutek Seinfeld, and the wry, tight direction of sitcorn swami James Burrows.
The essentials--writing, talent and target demographic-all came up cherries, gushing forth huge T-shirt sales, a maddeningly perky theme-song video on MTV, a briskly selling CD of Gen X-friendly music (Toad the Wet Sprocket, R.E.M.) and at least a dozen hyperactive Friends Web sites (trivia contests, info lines, chat rooms, drinking games). "For a while there," frumps cast member Matthew Perry, who plays Chandler, "I thought we were becoming the Monkeess."
In fact, despite a slight ratings dip around the New Year--most likely due to the onset of reruns--the merchandising has only escalated. Coca-Cola is staking $30 million on a Friends-centered campaign designed to win back young, calorie-conscious types who have switched from diet Coke to other drinks. Deployment began on the first of the year in college bookstores, on the Internet and on TV spots shot not by an ad agency but by the series's own production team.
Friends, an authorized compendium of plot synopses, quizzes and sound bites by David Wild, hit the stores last December, just in time to stuff countless Nielsen family stockings, rocketing to number two on The New York Times best-seller list. Should you still feel a bit peckish after devouring Wild's wiseass memoir by Marcel the Monkey, you can whip up Chandler's "Could This BE Any More Fattening?" Cheesecake from Cooking With Friends, the authorized cookbook. For deep esoterica ("How does Monica guesstimate the size of men's penises?"), you'll have to ante up for Jae-Ha Kim's unauthorized Best of Friends. (If you must know, it's the distance from the tip of a guy's thumb to the tip of his index finger. )
Could things get any more totally twirly? The show's perky ubiquity may be the reason I heard a clutch of Manhattan teens engage in a communal dis of a Friends window display of clothing. But dorky Friends boxer shorts aside, it's easy to see how it came to this. Despite the torrent of miserable, Prozac-infused novels and tedious Net chat rooms de- voted to actual or invented Gen X-hess, not much had made it to the networks. The only 25-year-olds living in prime time were the venal hunks 'n' tarts of Melrose Place. Somewhere between the box-office disappointments of Singles and Reality Bites and the gross authenticity of Puck's nose-picking problems on MTV's The Real World, young America needed credible, accessible Friends.
It didn't hurt that they hug a lot and work out. For if perpetually single Jerry and Elaine and Kramer are already fixed in a vat of almost-40 amber, if they play a bit cool and brittle in their settled neuroses, the Friends gang radiates the warm glow of possibility. Ovaries are still sprightly, resumes still crisp. Not to say that these three men and three women are coffee overachievers. (CBS is trying that with Almost Perfect, where the sexual tension between a hyper TV producer and an L.A. district attorney is controlled---predictably-- by dueling beepers.) Or underachievers (as in ABC's The Drew Carey Show, whose aging burp n' brewski single slackers have all the sex appeal of sticky tavern linoleum). The Friends are believable cusp careerists, just beginning or still undecided. Their expectations aren't huge. Like the rest of young Americans who were potty-trained during Watergate, they got the word on adult life early on: Expect it to suck. And so it is that in several cities, Friends enthusiasts have stopped Matt Perry and gotten very seriously in his face: -I hope you know what you're doing and how important it is. You're the voice of us in our twenties. DON'T MESS IT UP! And don't take it lightly. Perry, a small-screen master of deadpan zingers, says that his passion has rendered him speechless more than once. (-OH, MY GOD! I thought I was just going to sign an autograph, and all of a sudded we have this huge job ahead of us.)
Understandably, no one on the show is comfortable harping on this Gen X thing. But Schwimmer can muster some credible Zeit-signt beyond the obvious appeal of the cast and the writing: -I think for some people it's a fantasy to have this close a group of people, to have a family, really, of--well, I guess it's an attractive group. They're certainly loyal, fun and, in a way, cool. But I think that so many people have grown up products of divorce or not ideal family situations. And to have this kind of solid support group is something that I think everyone wants in their lives.
Does he think this might explain the kink of wierd role-playing that takes place on one of the very active Friends Web sites? (-So, I'm Rachel, and I've just met a real cute guy spraying Joop! at Bloomingdale's.) Schwimmer winces. -Eeesh. I'm not sure I want to know about all that.
As he pays for a giant container of black caffeine and a softball-sized chocolate muffin, the coffee bar begins to fill with potential bonding partners. Schwimmer suggests a walk.
"Um, maybe we can find a park bench and sit and talk."
"On Sunset?" I squeak. The man may have been born in Queens, New York, but he grew up here. Went to Beverly Hills High School. And somehow he doesn't know that in West Hollywood you'd stand a better chance of finding a fifty- foot rendering of Jon Boa Jovi's tush than four feet of wrought-iron pedestrian comfort. This Rossian cluelessness sets us wandering amid dim sum parlors and Milanese bondage-wear shops. After a few benchless blocks, we climb a steep side street and settle on a brick wall bordering a lawn. Now and then, our conversation is interrupted by someone leaving creepy heavy- breathing messages on a nearby answering machine left on full volume.
"Uhhhhahhhh. Unhhh. You there? Oh yes, ahhhhh..."
Knowing that Schwimmer has just bought a house in these 1oopy hills, I'm seized by one of those impulsive Care-Bear moments: "You sure you'll be OK up here?" He shrugs, then tries to explain some of his Tinseltown naivete: "My parents were both attorneys and New Yorkers." Very moral, very loving, very strict. He and his sister weren't even allowed to watch TV, except on Saturday nights, "when the best you could hope for was a double episode of The Love Boat." Yes, his mother handled Roseanne's first divorce. And, sure, there were showbiz kids in his classes, but he was "never into the whole Hollywood- glamour thing." He left for Chicago and Northwestern when he was 17, fell in thrall to the stage and cofounded the Lookingglass Theatre Company, with which he is still heavily involved. He returned to L.A. after graduation, lasted six months, then hightailed it back to his ad hoc family: fifteen hungry idealists putting on plays--and hanging out. "As I'm sure you've heard, life out here as a struggling actor, waiting tables, is soul sucking," he says. "So the theater company really kept my head straight."
In between plays, he tried TV: some small parts on L.A. Law, a recurring role as a nerdy vigilante on NYPD Blue. And like all his current costars who appeared in bombs (Vinnie & Bobby, Muddling Through, The Trouble With Larry), Schwimmer faced death by laugh track, most recently in the ill-fated 1994 Henry Winkler comeback vehicle, Monty. That experience made him swear off sitcoms forever. "I didn't feel like I was funny," he says, "and that's the worst feeling in the world."
He rescinded that ban when he read a startlingly good script written by the production team of David Crane, Marta Kauffman and Kevin Bright, the creators of Dream On and now the executive producers of Friends. They remembered Schwimmer from a past audition and wrote Ross for the hangdog neurotic voice they couldn't get out of their heads. Schwimmer was the only cast member offered his part without an audition.
Since then it's been raining opportunity: an AT&T commercial, a spot hosting Saturday Night Live, a starring role in The Pallbearer, a black comedy that opens in April, and a two-picture deal with Miramax. All this for averaging a few antic minutes of airtime per week before 28 million Americans.
"I don't think I'm any better an actor than I was five years ago," Schwimmer says. "Now I'm just a better financial risk. I have the higher Q rating." Thus it makes sense that in the season's seventh episode, Ross--who became happily involved with a pretty paleontologist named Julie--finds out that Rachel really likes him, too. That way. After all that hang-dog mooning, after about 10,000 fan queries--You guys ever gonna get together?--Ross and Rachel will begin. Maybe. "You're here on a great week," Schwimmer tells me, "because we have this... this kiss. It's really big for us."
Like when Sam finally boinked Diane ?
"I hope so. I think we've got a lot of, um...viewer investment."
The Kiss, Phase One: Stage 24, Warner Bros. Studios, in Burbank. Rachel and Ross have just found out they "have feelings" for each other, and they fight cute about their bad timing as Rachel closes Central Perk for the night. Ross storms off; she flings herself on the couch. He reappears; they meet in the middle of the room; they reach. At last: a kiss. Silence, until guest director Peter Bonerz--you know him as Jerry the Orthodontist from The Bob Newhart Show--calls for a huddle: "We're changing our LIVES here, people. Let's WORK it."
It's a calculated risk, tampering with sexual tensions on a starship that's just spun off a new line of Central Perk dorm wear. Long before the Kiss episode will air during the November sweeps, bad chemistry--real or imagined-- undermines some other singles shows. CBS sees Can't Hurry Love (more hapless relationship hunters in Manhattan) continue to slip against that cartoony singles soap Melrose Place. And CBS pulls the plug on If Not for You (dating dilemmas in Minneapolis) after just four episodes.
Just weeks into this musky mate-athon, The New York Times reports the first backlash: With eight o'clock sitcoms blaring about "Frosty the Sperm Man" and "nipular areas," more families are leaving the networks for child- friendly cable fare, such as Nick at Nite. The lubricious Singles Season's first three weeks cede cable networks a 24 percent gainover the same time last year. Some big advertisers are alienated-and once again, programmers begin to sweat. As The Larry Sanders Show lampoons Friends fever at the networks (Larry and Chris Elliott pitching a series about five tall jockeys chillin' out in the barn), even established winners circle their wagons. For the second time, Seinfeld distances itself from the newcomers by opting out of the yearly sweeps gimmick that has all the NBC Thursday-night singles visiting one another's shows. (Schwimmer, who happily consorts with his real-life high school pal Jonathan Silverman on The Single Guy, pronounces this lack of team spirit "a real bummer.")
Amid the pink slips and nervous handicapping of this mad date-and-dump derby, the Friends set still has the air of a winning locker room: close, clubby and adrenaline-rich. Pairs of giggling cast members wrestle on couches as the others run their lines. On the sofa in Central Perk, Chandler is complaining about Monica (Courteney Cox), who's been trying to help him lose weight with ceaseless punishing workouts. "She's got me doing butt clenches at my desk," he moans. "They won't bring me my mail anymore."
Schwimmer and Aniston are still blocking out the Kiss. It's four seconds the network will want to promote the bejesus out of, but no one is worried, least of all the canny architects of the "Ross-Rachel romantic arc." Rattling the kids' comfy cocoon with some intra-Friends sex seems natural, even necessary to them. "Much as I admire some shows," says Marta Kauffman, "there came a point in Cheers when you said, 'Oh, fuck her already. Please!' Maddie and David [in Moonlighting] ? 'Kiss the woman!'"
Friends are sexually responsible, but Friends do hit the sack with Others-- even the women. Because of that, the pilot show didn't test too well, according to NBC's Jamie McDermott, the 31 -year-old exec-on-the-move who shepherded the series through development. "Monica, the most grounded character, sleeps with a guy," McDermott explains. "Those social biases against it came out with test audiences." The young production/development team that McDermott heads decided it was a case of research be damned. "You've got to go with your gut," she says. "One of the differences between TV now and the Leave It to Beaver days is that adults then were much more infallible. Human beings make mistakes, and it's OK to put that on the air."
Hence the birth of Ross's son--with all the warring factions in the labor room--was last season's penultimate show, and rather sweet. Part of the show's appeal is its refreshing retreat from all sorts of correctness. Scripts reek of unregenerate guy behavior and plenty of erection jokes. There is youthful overindulgence. After watching Aniston weave deftly--and hilariously--through a drunk scene with a suffering blind date, Matt Perry wonders in concerned announcer tones about how a more, well, thoughtful show might treat two extra glasses of Chardonnay:
"This week, in a very special episode of Friends..."
Wow, there's Mel Gibson!"
Schwimmer nearly points, then catches himself. "Still kinda starstruck," he mutters. We are lunchlag in the Warner Bros. commissary. So is Mel. So is the rest of the Friends cast, at a separate table. They really do hang out together, profess to love one another and hew to an all-for-one media musketeerism, voting on interviews, reporters' set visits and the like. There is a lot of laughter from their table. A Warner's executive is working the room, squeezing shoulders, urging attendance at a mid-season victory party. All this is great--amazing!--says Schwimmer, who is busily plucking onions off his pre-Kiss cheeseburger. Of course, there are moments of weirdness now. Hard Copy lenses instantly zoomed in on Schwimmer's new home. Which is why a construction crew is feverishly slapping up a cinder block-and-stucco wall this morning.
As the child of attorneys, Schwimmer says he understands about compromise and has no problem with it. Putting his big, bankable TV face in the center of one Miramax feature will allow him to write for and direct his theater company in another. And if his part in The Pallbearer seems a tad Friends- ish, so be it. In that film, Schwimmer plays Tom, a struggling architect still living at home with mom. The comic tumblers start clicking when the mother of a high school classmate he can't remember asks him to be a pallbearer after her son's suicide. Soon the mom (Barbara Hershey) has given him the son's death car (an AMC Pacer)--and herself.
Billed as a black comedy, the film was cowritten by its first-time director, Matt Reeves. The characters are 25-plus singles and just-marrieds in Brooklyn (and Manhattan), with Gwyneth Paltrow as the unattainable girl Schwimmer's character has had a crush on since--yes, their Clearasil days. Visiting the film's set last summer, I watched Reeves direct a very tight shot of Schwimmer, Paltrow and two others in--yes, a Manhattan espresso house. "Take it down," Reeves would urge his star, gently. "It's that sitcom guy," teased Paltrow. "He's stressed out."
Coming from a medium heavy on mugging and light on modulation, Schwimmer says he was a bit anxious "trying to learn to act for film" until Barbara Hershey quoted a helpful line she attributed to Brando: "In a play, you have to show what you're thinking, and when you're in a film, you just think it."
Artfully tousled and in baleful close-up, his Tom seems meant to coax a '90s echo of Dustin Hoffman's graduate, Benjamin Braddock. Tom is kinder, fuzzier. He lacks that edgy '60s irony, but he is somewhat wiser than Ben. Tom knows that the real world sucks, and one of his final scenes--also at a wedding--is more capitulating than triumphal. Schwimmer would end up shooting this second ending months later, once he'd resumed his day job. "Going back to the sitcom," he says, "was a whole 'nother animal."
The Kiss, Phase Two: Schwimmer has been pacing. He thinks maybe he should steamroller the scene--gab Aniston, mess her up a little. Seems right after all this time. Bonerz yells for action, and Ross rockets through the door, grabs Rachel, lifts her in the air and starts the Kiss, which ends hard, against the counter. "Hey," says Bonerz, "it's a kiss, not tumbling."
-A lot rides on this, says Aniston during a break. "It's huge. HUGE." For that reason, she's thinking the Kiss should be slow. She likes the fact that Bonerz and the writers have just come up with three locks for her to struggle with before she can let Ross back in. Set carpenters are hammering at them now.
"I think slow is always good," she reasons. She and Schwimmer, her good friend, movie date and confidant in real life, have huddled and agreed to pull the scene like taffy the next time. Outside work, she notes, they're in very different romantic places. Schwimmer's longtime girlfriend, a Louisiana attorney, has just moved here to take a job with a Century City law firm. "And I'm single," sighs Aniston, now officially one of People's Most Intriguing People. "I actually love it. I was in a relationship for five years. It's like being let out of prison--oh, not that it was prison."
On the series premiere, Rachel showed up in a wedding dress, scared and panting, having just left her nice-but-boring orthodontist at the altar. Brave new vistas opened up when the Friends made her cut up Daddy's charge cards and get a job. Aniston, a former burger-joint waitress, had no trouble playing that moment of scary singles lib. Now she gets to live it. "It's just that feeling of sunlight," she says. "Wow, what do I do? I feel like I'm back where I started when I was 20. Not knowing anything. I don't want to date. What do people say now? Where do they go?"
All of the actors have felt their lives seeping into their characters. The producers listened closely to Matt Perry's woeful recitation of a weekend date, and soon after, his terse assessment--"I'm pretty confident I'll die alone"--became a Chandler story arc. "I'm not dead," Chandler soliloquized after a dismal party experience, "and yet I have no life."
The producers also encourage improv, especially if it's mined from real life in the singles trenches. Says Kauffman, "Why shut them up if they can make it better? We're comedy whores--we'll take it from anywhere."
Occasionally, the slim decade's age difference between the show's boomer creators and their cast has pointed up a sexual conservatism that surprises the producers. "We were in our twenties in the '70s, early '80s, when drugs and sex were OK," says Kauffman. "We did an episode recently about how long Ross would wait to have sex with Julie." The magic number, the producers decided, should be a sidesplitting six weeks. "David and Kevin and I--those of us hovering around 40--were going six weeks? What?" recalls Kauffman. "And a lot of the guys in their twenties--guys!-were going, 'That's OK. So it took six weeks, nothing freakish about that.' We're going, 'Uh-huh. OK."'
In fact, beneath the lesbian in-laws and publicly declared lusts, a certain core traditionalism and a baseline decency may be the Friends' darkest secret, on-screen and off. There are no predatory Arnie Beckers among them, no conniving Sammy Jos. Friends' February-sweeps show would feature a plot with some lesbian friends-of-Friends, but, hey--they're getting married. Commitment.
"The Friends spend every episode banging on each other," observes Jamie McDermott. "But if anyone were in trouble, you have no doubt the other five would be lined up to help."
At bottom, making light of loneliness is the leitmotif of this Season o' Singles. It's the demon that has George and Jerry warming themselves nightly at the Greeks' greasy hearth, that hounds the flannel shirttails of Silverman's Single Guy. Schwimmer tells me that some of his single friends now talk as though marriage and children just might not be so important anymore, and it gives him the willies.
"It's strange for me to hear," he says. "I've always wanted a family. I think that's why we're here, very simply--to have children and raise them well and try to improve the quality of life for people in general and for the ones to follow."
Ward Cleaver couldn't have said it better. But you wouldn't have found him dressing the Beav in a T-shirt that says, MY MOMMIES LOVE ME.
The Kiss run-through, final try: Rachel is flailing at the locks. Basset eyes watch her through the glass. Click, turn, she gets the locks, opens both doors wide. Beat. Ross reaches; his arms travel up from her waist, wrap her, nearly lift her. The kiss is...hot! Long...
Marta Kauffman screams. Above wild cast and crew applause, she is moaning, "This is terrible. I'm so sad. Why am I so emotional?" Schwimmer and Aniston hug. In a quieter voice, Kauffman is asking, "Who knew that David could be so sexy?" When things calm down, David Crane faces his actors. "Serieswise," he says, "this moment is extraordinarily satisfying."
Says Jerry the Orthodontist, "Amen."