Why the ‘Friends’ reunion keeps slipping through our fingers

The possibility of a ‘Friends’ reunion once seemed like a pipe dream. In February 2020, it seemed set to become reality – until the coronavirus pandemic got in the way. Clémence Michallon looks back on the history of a doomed TV special

David Schwimmer, Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and Lisa Kudrow on the set of 'Friends'. (Warner Bros Television)

It was to be the most exciting thing on HBO Max: a full Friends cast reunion, featuring all of the sitcom’s six stars for the first time in 16 years. When HBO Max broke the news in February, in a press release titled "The One Where They Got Back Together", the announcement was met with immediate and widespread interest.

It didn’t hurt that the reunion special came on the heels of a wave of renewed Friends nostalgia, just a few months after a pop-up exhibition in New York City and Boston marked the 25th anniversary of the show’s premiere. HBO Max’s announcement seemed like the fitting conclusion to years of rumours, dashed hopes, and bated breaths on fans’ part.

The forthcoming special was also a source of major promotional pull for the yet-to-be-launched streaming platform. The plan was to make the Friends reunion – an unscripted special shot on the sitcom’s original sound stage in Burbank, California – available to subscribers from day one.

But of course, like all great plans recently, it was thrown off by the coronavirus pandemic. In April, about a month after the crisis prompted production shutdowns across the entertainment industry, HBO Max confirmed that the Friends reunion would no longer be part of the launch catalogue.

Since then, the programme has found itself in limbo. Executives still plan on filming it as soon as possible, and the special is still being touted in HBO Max’s promotional materials as a future offering. Potential shooting and release dates have been mentioned in media interviews, but specific plans have yet to be announced.

Appetite for more Friends content predates the show’s finale. Kelsey Miller, the author of I'll Be There For You: The One about Friends, a thorough history of the series, chalks it up to the specificities of TV as opposed to cinema. While movies are pretty definitive in their storytelling, “with TV, there’s always the promise of more”, she notes.

A 2004 Associated Press piece, reported during rehearsals for the show’s final episode, makes mention of rumours concerning a potential reunion film. “A reunion?” Aniston is quoted as saying at the time. “We haven't even left yet.”

The report also makes mention of the stars joking they’d be willing to get involved in a reunion movie for $4m each – four times what they earned per Friends episode towards the end of the series. Naturally, no official figures have been released as to the cast’s earnings for the reunion special, but The Hollywood Reporter estimated that Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry, and Matt LeBlanc will each make between $2.5 and $3m.

For a while, prospects of a Friends reunion seemed doomed. In 2016, a partial reunion featuring everyone but Perry was deemed “a total car crash” and “a total bust”. Perhaps worryingly for HBO Max executives, that special followed the same unscripted format as the planned new reunion, with the stars sitting down and reminiscing on their 10 years together.

While clearly not infallible, this format appears to be the only one that makes sense: Friends was a show about twenty- and thirty-somethings growing into full-seasoned adults in the 1990s and 2000s. Attempting to revive it today would inevitably mean stripping it of its very essence, hence the rather strong consensus that Friends is best left alone in that regard.

Co-creator Marta Kauffman herself made no mystery of her complete opposition to any type of reboot – or even a reunion – during an anniversary panel in September 2019. “We will not be doing a reunion show. We will not be doing a reboot,” she said according to Variety. Kauffman gave two reasons for her reluctance: “One of the reasons we won’t do a reunion is because this is a show about a time in your life when your friends are your family. And when you have a family, that changes. But the other reason is it’s not going to beat what we did.”

David Crane, her co-creator, agreed, adding: “We did the show we wanted to do. We got it right, and we put a bow on it. If you visited those characters now, it just would not be the same DNA and chances are, it wouldn’t be as good.”

Even with a reboot off the table, there was still the possibility of a Friends reunion of some sort. Lisa Kudrow floated the idea in January 2018 during an interview with Conan O’Brien, telling the host: “Something should be done. I don’t know what.” Kudrow, too, acknowledged that Friends was an unlikely candidate for a reboot: “That was about people in their twenties, thirties. The show isn’t about people in their forties, fifties. And if we have the same problems, that’s just sad.”

Hopes for a reunion solidified through Aniston. She was the one who, in October 2019, told Ellen DeGeneres that she and her former co-stars were “working on something” together. That was days after she shared a selfie with the five other cast members as her first Instagram post, which proved so popular it caused the platform to crash. It still took four months for an official announcement to be made public by HBO Max.

At an industry event earlier this month, Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, expressed hope that the Friends reunion special will be filmed by the end of summer, while executive producer Kevin Bright has pondered the possibility of a Thanksgiving release. This depends presumably on when lockdown restrictions can be eased in California, paving the way for the TV industry to resume production. In the meantime, we are left with a catalogue of 236 episodes – and the promise that one day, the cast will be there for us once more.