On 22 September 1994, a new comedy show started on American TV. It was about six young people in New York. The actors were not famous. Most people did not know their names. The first episode was not a big hit.
Ten years later, on 6 May 2004, the last episode of the same show was on TV. That night, 52.5 million people in the United States watched it. The show was called Friends. Today, more than thirty years after the first episode, people all over the world still watch it. How did a small show about coffee and friendship become so big?
Six friends and one coffee shop
Friends is a sitcom — a short, funny TV show about the same people in the same places. Each episode is about 22 minutes long. The show has 10 seasons and 236 episodes.
There are six main characters. Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) runs away from her own wedding in the first episode. She has no job and no money, so she starts working as a waitress. Monica (Courteney Cox) is Rachel’s old school friend. She is a chef, and she loves a clean and tidy home. Ross (David Schwimmer) is Monica’s brother. He is a paleontologist — a scientist who studies dinosaurs. He has loved Rachel since school.
Chandler (Matthew Perry) makes jokes all the time, often when he feels nervous. Joey (Matt LeBlanc) is an actor who does not get many good roles. He loves food more than anything. Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) is a strange and kind woman who plays the guitar and sings funny songs, like “Smelly Cat”.
The friends meet almost every day at a coffee shop called Central Perk. They sit on a big orange sofa and talk about work, love and money. Central Perk was not a real café. But fans loved it so much that people later opened copies of it in other countries, for example in China.
A show with many names
Two writers, David Crane and Marta Kauffman, created the show. At first, it was not called Friends. The writers tried other names: Insomnia Cafe, Friends Like Us and Six of One. Only later did they choose the short and simple name.
Finding the right actors was not easy. Courteney Cox first came to try for the role of Rachel. But the producers thought she was better for Monica, so she got that role. Jennifer Aniston then became Rachel.
The writers also changed the love stories. In early plans, Monica and Joey were going to be a couple. In the end, the most famous couple of the show was Ross and Rachel. And Monica fell in love with Chandler.
New York… in California
The story happens in New York, but the show was not filmed there. The team made almost every episode on Stage 24 at the Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California. That is about 4,000 kilometres from New York. Today, this stage has a new name: “The Friends Stage”.
The show had a live audience. Real people sat in the studio and watched the actors. When you hear people laugh in an episode, it is often a real laugh from that audience.
The famous opening of the show is also from California. In it, the six friends dance in a big fountain. They are not in a New York park — they are at the Warner Bros. studio. The song in the opening is “I’ll Be There for You” by a band called The Rembrandts.
But one thing is really in New York. In the show, you often see the outside of the friends’ apartment building. This building is real. It is in Greenwich Village, a small and old part of Manhattan. Today, many tourists go there and take photos in front of it.
From $22,500 to $1 million
In the first season, each of the six actors got $22,500 for one episode. That is good money, but it is not much for a TV star.
Then the show became very popular. The studio started to pay some actors more than others. The six actors did not like this. They made a plan: they decided to ask for money together, as one team. All six wanted the same pay. Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer were the most popular at that time, but they agreed to take less money so that everyone got the same.
The plan worked. Year after year, their pay went up. In seasons 9 and 10, each actor got $1 million for one episode. That is about 44 times more than in the first season. The three women in the show became the best-paid women on TV at that time.
Season 1: $22,500 for one episode. Seasons 9 and 10: $1,000,000 for one episode — for each of the six actors.
The money did not stop after the show ended. The actors still get money every time the old episodes are on TV or online. In 2026, Lisa Kudrow said that each actor still gets about $20 million a year from the show.
The last episode — and life after it
The last episode is called “The Last One”. Before it, TV companies sold time for advertisements. Thirty seconds of advertising in this episode cost about $2 million. At that time, it was the most expensive advertising in any comedy show.
Filming the last episode was very emotional. The actors cried, and sometimes they had to stop filming. At the end of the episode, the six friends leave Monica’s apartment for the last time. They put their keys on the table and go to have one more coffee together.
But the show did not really end. In the 2010s, it came to Netflix, and a new, younger generation found it. Many of these viewers were not born in 1994. In 2018, people said that Netflix was going to lose the show. Fans were angry and wrote online petitions. After that, Netflix paid about $100 million to show Friends for one more year, 2019. Then the show moved to another service, HBO Max.
In May 2021, the six actors met again for a special show called Friends: The Reunion. They visited the old studio, sat on the orange sofa and talked about their memories. Many fans watched it with tears in their eyes.
Two years later, there was very sad news. Matthew Perry, the actor who played Chandler, died on 28 October 2023. He was 54 years old. Millions of fans around the world remembered his jokes and his kind words.
Why do people still watch it?
There are no smartphones in Friends. The characters use big old phones and wait for calls at home. Their clothes and hair are from the 1990s. Rachel’s haircut in the first seasons was so popular that it got its own name: “The Rachel”. Many women in the 1990s went to the hairdresser and asked for it. So why does a new generation still love this old world?
Maybe the answer is simple. The show is not really about New York or about the 1990s. It is about a time in life when your friends are your family. You have no money, your job is not perfect, and your love life is a mess. But you have people who sit with you on the sofa every day.
For people who learn English, Friends has one more good point. The characters use everyday English: short sentences, simple words and real jokes. Many learners watch it again and again, first with subtitles, then without them. What about you — which of the six friends are you most like?
