While Friends was considered progressive for its time, the ‘90s classic sitcom faced its fair share of network pushback. Co-creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman recalled that they once had to stand up to an NBC executive who wanted to change Monica Geller’s (Courteney Cox) pilot plot, which featured her sleeping with someone on a first date.
“The guy who was in charge said: ‘We’re not going to like Monica because [in the pilot] she sleeps with a guy on the first date.’ We made the argument that it makes her sympathetic,” Crane told U.K.’s The Times in a retrospective article about the series.
In “The Pilot,” chef Monica sleeps with a co-worker nicknamed “Paul the wine guy” on a first date after he shares with her that he hasn’t had sex with anyone since his last breakup two years prior. As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that he lied to get her into bed.
“The network, in trying to prove that the audience wouldn’t like Monica if she sleeps with a guy on the first date, distributed a little questionnaire to the audience at our dress rehearsal,” Crane said. “And it was so skewed. The question was like: ‘When Monica sleeps with a guy on her first date, is she a) a slut or b) a harlot?’”
However, the audience chose a third, unlisted, none of the above option. “People wrote in saying: ‘No, it’s fine’,” Crane said.
In the same interview, Kauffman mentioned another instance where the audience helped shape the sitcom’s plotlines — that of Monica and Chandler’s (Matthew Perry) relationship.
“We thought it would be a one-night stand,” Kauffman explained. “But they received such a strong reaction from the audience in London that it actually altered where we were going with the storyline.”
