Writing for Friends Was No Dream Job
Ever since I retired from television writing at the ripe age of 38, people have asked me: “Why would you quit such a cool career?” Especially if they know I worked on popular shows like Friends, Freaks and Geeks, Desperate Housewives, and Breaking Bad. It’s impossible to answer this question over the course of a cocktail party conversation. Where would I even begin? There were the grueling hours, the egotistical bosses, the politics and dysfunction, the ways in which TV writing is more like making widgets than creating art—there’s everything that the Writers Guild of America is currently fighting against with their ongoing strike, and the issues have only gotten more complex since I retired in 2008. The decision to quit had been forming for years. I had been working as a television writer for a decade, and for at least half of that time I wanted out. My disillusionment had begun at my very first writing job but was momentarily staved off by a positive experience at Freaks and Geeks. Then came Friends. When my agent told me the Friends team wanted to meet with me, I was stunned. It was, without a doubt, America’s most popular sitcom. Friends wasn’t just a show; it was a juggernaut. Therefore, whether I wanted to write for it was irrelevant. What kind of fool would pass up the chance? Still, that didn’t stop me from arguing for my limitations. “I’m not a joke writer,” I insisted to my agent, Larry Salz. “The comedy on Freaks and Geeks was character-based.” “They don’t need another joke writer. They want someone who’s good with story and character.” This made me feel only slightly less petrified. Writing for Friends after only two years of experience seemed equivalent to going straight to the Olympics after just learning to skate. If I screwed up, it could ruin my career. What made the situation even more uncomfortable was that NBC had just launched a diversity program, a sort of voluntary affirmative action. The network was making efforts to hire more writers of color. On principle, I support affirmative action policies because I believe overcoming institutional racism without it is impossible. But in practice? It’s a major mindf-ck. You don’t know if you’re getting the job because of your talent or your race. Naturally, I wondered whether I was hired for Friends because of the diversity program or because I was the right person for the job. But dwelling on that question wasn’t going to help my career. Friends had many writer-producers in decision-making positions, and because it was important for new writers to fit the culture, I had to be vetted by a total of eight people. These included the creators, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, and a bunch of erudite Harvard and Yale grads.
Via: TIME
