September 22, 1994: "Friends" Premieres

Left to right: Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, David Schwimmer,

Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow

September 22, 1994: The sitcom Friends premieres, at 8:30 PM U.S. Eastern Time, in between NBC's established hit sitcoms Mad About You and Seinfeld. It helped to make Thursday night fit the Peacock Network's slogan of "Must See TV."

The main cast, each of whom had some sitcom experience (though not all successfully), was as follows:

* Courteney Cox as Monica Geller, a 25-year-old chef from a never-specified town on New York's Long Island. She has an apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village. On the show, the address is given as 425 Bleecker Street. In real life, that address does not exist. The real building used for exterior shots was at 90 Bedford Street, on the corner of Bleecker. The apartment is secretly in her grandmother's name, and, between that and rent control, enables her to live there cheaply.

In such groups, there's always a leader, and, for this group, Monica is it, by force of personality. She is incredibly competitive, a control freak and a neat freak, who was fat as a teenager and worked it off through sheer willpower. Her love-life is bad: As Joey points out, when she begins the episode by saying she's got a date, "Come on! You're going out with the guy. There's gotta be something wrong with him!" This line gets retroactively funnier when she and Chandler end up together.

* David Schwimmer as Ross Geller, Monica's brother, 2 years older. He's an anthropologist who works at a thinly-disguised version of the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side. He's a nerd who takes things personally. While Monica almost never mentions faith, Ross cares about being Jewish.

In the pilot episode, his wife, Carol (played in the 2nd episode by Anita Barone, and thereafter by Jane Sibbett), has just left him, after discovering at age 27 that she's a lesbian. In the 2nd episode, she is revealed to be pregnant, and, with son Ben's birth in the next-to-last episode of Season 1, Ross has to negotiate a three-way parenting thing.

* Jennifer Aniston as Rachel Green. A stereotypical JAP (Jewish-American Princess), she was Monica's best friend in high school, but they drifted apart. She got a nosejob and a dentist fiancée, but, in the pilot, she leaves him at the altar, runs into Central Perk, the coffee bar where the gang hangs out, finds Monica, and the two reconnect.

Rachel moves in with Monica, and, having to take care of herself for the first time in her life, gets a job waitressing at Central Perk. She's not very good at it, but Gunther (last name never revealed, played by James Michael Tyler), the manager, keeps her on, because he has a serious crush on her.

Not as serious as Ross, though: He'd been in love with her ever since high school, but, in the present as well as in the past, he can't bring himself to tell her.

(NBC had debuted the hospital drama ER 3 days earlier, and it had a character named Rachel Greene, with an E on the end, the daughter of the show's initial main character, a preteen at that point. She gets phased out after her parents' divorce, only occasionally reappearing, including in the finale, where she's graduated medical school and interning at her late father's hospital.)

* Lisa Kudrow as Phoebe Buffay. Her father left when she was little, and her mother committed suicide when Phoebe was 14, so she lived on the street until meeting Monica, and became her college roommate. She eventually moved out due to Monica's issues. She's a masseuse, who moonlights as a singer, with weird songs based on her weird life, often performing at Central Perk.

Kudrow had previously appeared on another NBC Thursday night sitcom, Mad About You, as Ursula, the ditzy waitress at a bar called Riff's. In Friends' 1st season, it is established at Phoebe are identical twins, albeit with very different personalities. This becomes a problem later on when Ursula dates Joey, and later still when uses Phoebe's name to star in porno movies, including Buffay the Vampire Layer. It's only when Joey notices a tattoo that Ursula has but Phoebe doesn't that they know it's not Phoebe.

* Matthew Perry as Chandler Bing. Also a product of a broken home: His mother is a romance novelist, and his father is a drag singer in Las Vegas, who left the family when Chandler was 9, right after Thanksgiving dinner. Chandler had been Ross' college roommate, and has a cubicle job at the show's beginning, but soon gets promoted to an executive job -- a vague job that is never really defined.

* And Matt LeBlanc as Joey Tribbiani. The Staten Island native, now Chandler's roommate in an apartment across the hall from Monica and Rachel, is an actor and a womanizer. At first, he seemed to be of reasonable intelligence. But, as the show went on, he got dumber.

And that was typical of the show: Over the course of 10 seasons, the characters eventually became parodies of what they originally were, their annoying characteristics getting worse. Ross and Rachel got together, then split up in Season 3 (the show's "jump the shark" moment), went back and forth, had a baby together in Season 8, and finally ended up together in the series finale. Monica and Chandler got together in the Season 4 finale, married in the Season 7 finale, and, after fertility issues, adopted twins in the series finale. Phoebe married someone from out of the circle (played by a pre-Avengers Paul Rudd), and Joey went to Hollywood to pursue his acting dream. The spinoff Joey did not do well, its last episode airing on August 23, 2006, ending the franchise after 12 years.

Monica and Ross' parents were played by Elliott Gould and St. Elsewhere actress Christina Pickles. Rachel's parents were played by Marlo Thomas and Tony-winning Broadway star Ron Leibman. Phoebe's birth parents were played by Teri Garr and Bob Balaban, familiar to NBC Thursday night viewers as NBC executive Russell Dalrymple on Seinfeld. Joey's parents were played by Brenda Vaccaro and Robert Costanzo, an actor who usually played blue-collar guys (as he did on that show) and mobsters. And Chandler's parents were played by Morgan Fairchild and... Kathleen Turner, to emphasize the fact that his father wasn't just gay, but transgender.

Which brings me to this point: In addition to the characters' bad points getting deepened as the show went along, a lot of things about the show don't hold up well. The cast was nearly all-white, with very few minority characters. The gay jokes -- about the actually gay characters, and the perception that straight characters might be gay -- now seem really insensitive. And Ross' transformation from a lovable loser to a nasty jerk, acting as more of a control freak where Rachel was concerned than Monica ever was with anyone, is a black mark on the show.

Still, the show remains a favorite among people of Generation X, people who grew up in the 1970s and '80s, like me. It was the 1st TV show to show us as adults, however immature. The 1st season was wonderful; the 2nd, really good; the 3rd, pretty good; but as soon as Ross and Rachel went, or didn't go, "on a break," it never really recovered. It reached 10 seasons, lasting until May 6, 2004, mostly on inertia.

UPDATE: Matthew Perry was the first member of the main cast to die, on October 28, 2023. James Michael Tyler, who played Gunther -- never quite "The Seventh Friend" -- died on October 24, 2021.

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September 22, 1994 was a Thursday. Baseball's Strike of '94 was on. But there was a score on this historic day, in college football: Virginia Tech, ranked Number 14 in the country, beat semi-rival West Virginia, 34-6 at Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, Virginia.