I'll Be There For You

They had fun codirecting Godspell and so decided to do another play, and then another. There was no formal agreement, but Kauffman and Crane now realized they both enjoyed creating theater, maybe more than performing—and they enjoyed it even more when creating it together.

“I don’t even know which of us said it,” Crane recalled. But, on a whim, one of them suggested they write something. The way he tells it, the decision to become writing partners went something like: “Yeah, let’s write something! It’ll be a musical! Sure!” Kauffman shrugged and nodded. “We have a barn.”

Neither had ever written a play, let alone a musical. So they did what one is supposed to do in college: experimented. They booked a theater space and commissioned classmates Seth Friedman and Billy Dreskin1 to help out.

This play would become the first Kauffman-Crane production, titled Waiting for the Feeling. (It was exactly what it sounds like, according to Kauffman: “An angst-driven, collegiate, ‘comedy’” about how hard it is to be a college student.) Still, the experience confirmed what they’d first come to realize while directing Godspell. They clicked. They were good (if still juvenile) writers. They understood each other, but also complemented one another. Crane was analytical, his focus homed in on the words on the page. Kauffman was better with emotion, and enjoyed the creative work of taking a story from script to stage and, later, to screen. Down the line, during the production of Friends, Crane preferred to stay in the writers’ room, tweaking jokes and refining stories, while Kauffman did much of the creative producing on set, checking wardrobe, watching camera blocking, and hashing scenes out with the actors.

What made Kauffman and Crane such a strong team was the fact that they could put their heads together and create something, and then step apart to execute their vision in slightly separate roles. They had talent and dynamism and extraordinary work ethic, but they also had trust. On this foundation, the pair would go on to forge a lifelong friendship, and a twenty-seven-year creative partnership, which would forever alter the trajectory of both network and cable television programming. It was a natural, comfortable interdependence. Together, they just worked.

When people wonder about that ineffable magic that made Friends such a hit, much credit (if not all credit) is given to the cast. But Kauffman and Crane were the primary ingredient, no question. It was not only the fortitude of their professional relationship, but the intimacy and trust within their personal one. They were the original friends.

Kauffman and Crane moved to New York after college, pursuing the musical-theater career they’d begun at Brandeis. They wrote their next show, Personals, along with former classmate Seth Friedman. It was a musical revue about the people behind newspaper personal ads, featuring music and lyrics by none other than Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz—already musical-theater stars, and on the verge of becoming musical-theater legends, as well as the musicians behind virtually every Disney animated feature of the 1990s. Personals made the rounds on college festival circuits, and even a USO tour, before landing off-Broadway in 1985, where it starred a twenty-six-year-old Jason Alexander. The production was bursting at the seams with talent, and yet reviews were almost comically mixed. “Entertaining and ingenious,” declared the New York Post. “Unfailingly mirthless,” countered the Times.

Still, Kauffman and Crane had laid solid groundwork for what they planned as a lifelong career in the theater. Only in their late twenties, they’d already written and mounted a handful of off-Broadway plays and musicals—some with Kauffman’s new husband, composer Michael Skolff—many of which were well received. If they weren’t yet an established hit, they were on their way, with no plans to change course.

Then television agent Nancy Josephson came to see Personals. She, too, was a relative newbie, on the cusp of titanic success—much of which would arise from her decision to contact Kauffman and Crane, and eventually sign them as clients. That night, after seeing the show, she reached out to the playwrights. Had they ever considered writing for TV? Not really. Did they want to give it a shot? Why not.

Josephson tasked Kauffman and Crane to come up with ten television concepts to shop around. Crane is the first to acknowledge that some of the show ideas were, in a word, “crazy.” Others were just bad. But Kauffman and Crane were undaunted, perhaps because, being so far removed from Hollywood, they had no real sense of the competition they were up against. At that point, television would be at best a side gig, with both of them still committed to the theater. They flew out to Los Angeles for meetings occasionally, but remained firmly rooted in New York. And then, out of the blue, someone bought one of their scripts.

“Talk about your first work not being your best work,” Crane said, shaking his head. “It was called Just a Guy. And it was really just about a guy… I don’t know, it was really lame.” But it was a milestone—a massive turning point in their career. “We sat in the rental car, screaming,” Kauffman recalled. Just a Guy was never produced, but now they could say that they’d sold something. “And then we were able to sell a few more scripts that didn’t get produced,” said Crane. On the one hand, they’d spent years doing unpaid work on unproduced scripts, flying back and forth across the country, and this was the big payoff: five minutes of screaming in a rental car, and a fee that, after commission, probably wouldn’t cover rent on either of their apartments, let alone both. On the other hand, they were TV writers now, officially. In selling one lousy script, they’d shot past the thousands of other writers out there trying to do just that.

It was the third of three key events in their early professional partnership—the one that made them pack up and leave their lives in New York, to try this TV thing, for real. The first was simply meeting Josephson, and agreeing to her suggestion that they give TV a shot. (When later asked about her role in their career, Josephson took no more or less credit than she was due: “I saw the play and thought they should work in TV. I guess I was right about that.”)

The second moment happened after Josephson told them it was time to formalize their writing team. By then, Kauffman and Crane were doing some work as a pair, and some as a trio, with their friend Seth Friedman, who had cowritten Personals. Then Josephson brought them a potential gig working on a screenplay. It would turn out to be just another script that never got produced, but the nameless project became a turning point, nonetheless. As Josephson was finalizing the deal, she told Kauffman and Crane they had to decide whether or not they would do this job with Friedman, or work together as a pair. If this was a partnership, it was time to make it official, once and for all. They had twenty-four hours to make the call.

That evening, Kauffman found herself in a taxicab, inching her way home through the driving rain. A sign, she thought. “And I sit up, and I look at the license of the cabdriver. And his name was David Yu.” That was it, as far as she was concerned. From then on, it was David and Marta. They were partners. And soon they were off to LA together, for good.

“The meeting that you think is not going to yield anything is the one that’s going to change your life.” When asked for his advice to aspiring TV writers, this was David Crane’s reply. “If success should happen, you have no idea how it’s going to happen.” He and Kauffman were brought into the television world because of their exceptional creative and story-crafting abilities. They then spent years ideating, pitching, maybe selling but never producing, and heading back to the drawing board, hoping the next one would be a hit. In other words, they were following the traditional path toward (fingers crossed) success. But in the end, success turned up in an unexpected detour from that path. It wasn’t one of those myriad pitch meetings that got Kauffman and Crane their big break. It was simply the fact Universal Studios had a bunch of old black-and-white TV shows lying around, and was looking for a way to make money off them.

The way the story goes, in the late 1980s, director/producer John Landis had a bungalow on the Universal lot. He hadn’t had a hit in a couple years, and so studio chief Sid Scheinberg charged him with the task of coming up with a show using Universal’s enormous anthology of midcentury television footage. As Kauffman recalled, they’d brought in “thousands” of writers to invent series ideas around this archival material. Game shows, Mystery Science Theater–style shows, and none of it had worked. By the time they reached out to Kauffman and Crane, she said, “they were scraping the bottom of the barrel, talking to two musical-theater writers.” They were in Los Angeles, about to fly home to New York after wrapping up yet another fruitless pitch meeting, when Josephson called and asked if they could squeeze in one more before going to the airport. As Crane recalled, “We went in, and they showed us six minutes of black-and-white clips and said, ‘What would you do?’ And we said, ‘We have absolutely no idea.’” Another flop, but, oh, well. Every other writer in town had flopped, too, and anyway, this meeting was little more than a pit stop on the way to the airport. They got on the plane, took off, and that’s when something occurred to them. “By the time we got off the plane, we had an idea,” said Crane. It wasn’t even a pitch, but just a vague concept about a guy who’d grown up watching old TV shows, which popped into his head like funny little thought bubbles. Or something like that. They got home, dropped their bags, and called the studio. “And they said, ‘Come back.’”

Kauffman and Crane’s airplane pitch would become Dream On, a cult HBO comedy series about a divorced father who, like so many of his generation, had been raised in front of the television. In each episode, his fantasies and thoughts appeared, literally, on-screen, via clips from his favorite childhood TV shows. Airing from 1990 to 1996, Dream On was a quirky mix of nostalgia and humor. Most importantly, it was, as the critics put it, “adult.”

Dream On was one of HBO’s first forays into scripted series, debuting at a time when premium cable was stuck in a dangerous rut. The draw of these channels was the luxury of being able to watch feature films at home, without commercial interruption. Since launching in 1972, HBO had been on a steady, exponential rise. “But then the bubble burst,” the Los Angeles Times reported. VCRs, pay-per-view, and new basic-cable movie channels like TNT and AMC were now incentivizing viewers to ditch pricey premium subscriptions. In 1990, HBO’s customer base grew by only 1.8%, with 4.5% of existing subscribers canceling every month. In creating original programming, HBO couldn’t just deliver a show that was good. If they wanted to survive, they had to give people something they couldn’t get on network television. Two things, really: sex and swearing. Kauffman and Crane turned in their first draft to Executive Producer John Landis, who sent it back with two notes: “It needs to be funnier, [and] it needs to be dirtier.”

Other than that, Kauffman and Crane could pretty much call the shots. They had zero experience and total creative authority. They were thrilled, but panicked, and rightfully so. Shortly before beginning production, recalled Crane: “We were actually talking to a couple writer friends, going, ‘Okay, so you hire writers…and then you sit around talking about what the episodes could be? And then does someone go off and write it? Or do you write it as a group?’” The general feedback from their fellow writer friends was something along the lines of “I hate you.”

So they winged it. They had a staff of three writers and a warehouse in North Hollywood, where they whipped up a show that they thought was funny, and hoped everyone else would, too. In the end, they didn’t win over everyone, but more than enough. Dream On was HBO’s first definitive hit, as well as Kauffman and Crane’s, though today its legacy has been largely lost in the shuffle. Watching it now, it feels very much like a relic of its time: one part a standard story of a divorced dad muddling through middle age, and the other part a naughty cable show, where everyone swears like a sailor and walks around with their nipples out. But look beyond the titillation and it’s a quiet triumph.

Dream On was often mixed with the critics; the most typical complaint was that the language and sexuality seemed a little too deliberate, which, of course, it was. But it was a solid success, and signaled a sea change for premium cable, and for HBO in particular. Dream On was quickly followed by shows that further cracked the mold of traditional television formats, allowing for both sophisticated and oddball comedy, nuanced and polarizing drama, and the kind of stories that simply didn’t sell before, because no one knew if an audience would buy them. It proved that television didn’t have to cast the widest net possible in order to be successful. A show could be smart and specific and sellable, all at the same time.

Dream On is not often mentioned alongside those other early series—The Larry Sanders Show, Oz, The Sopranos, Sex and the City—which would come to define HBO as a leader in innovative, high-quality entertainment. Indeed, it doesn’t belong on the same list as those series. But there is no doubt that Dream On was the launch pad for them all. In the wake of all the behemoth successes that came after it, Dream On has faded into relative obscurity—an artifact from an era when it was still risqué to drop an F-bomb or display two whole butt cheeks in the same frame. But without it, there would be no Sex and the City, and almost certainly no Friends.

With Dream On, Kauffman and Crane had a hit under their belt, an Emmy nomination,2 as well as the experience of running a show. Most importantly, they now had Kevin S. Bright. “When we first started, technically speaking, we weren’t partners. I was their boss,” Bright later explained during his own interview with the Television Academy Foundation. Along with John Landis, Bright was an executive producer on Dream On. But it became clear very quickly that Bright was a natural—and necessary—collaborator in the Kauffman-Crane partnership. “He’s really good at a lot of stuff that a) we’re not great at, and b) we really don’t care about,” Crane explained. Bright knew how to pull together a great crew, manage all the nuts and bolts of producing, and usher a show through postproduction. “[Dream On] was a show that lived and died in the editing room,” explained Crane, and that was entirely Bright’s domain. Plus, they just clicked. “We had shorthand with each other,” Bright explained with a shrug. “We were three ex–New Yorkers.”

Two years into Dream On, the three of them formed Bright/Kauffman/Crane Productions, the company that would produce not only Friends, but Veronica’s Closet, Jesse, and, finally, Joey. Shortly thereafter, their deal with Universal was up for renewal, and while Dream On was riding high on its surprise success, the studio didn’t seem all that eager to make them an offer, or even meet with them. “It was one of those things that happens in television, where the company you’re working for feels you owe them,” said Bright. “Rather than they owe you for creating success for them.” Every other studio was very much interested, though, and after meeting with Les Moonves (then president of Lorimar Television, which soon combined operations with Warner Bros.), they signed a development deal, and left Dream On.

The team had only two real deal breakers in mind when it came to future projects: first, no single-star shows. Dream On’s premise had required lead actor Brian Benben to appear in nearly every scene of every episode, an exhausting demand that often made shooting difficult for him and therefore everyone else on the production team. That was a relatively easy ask given that few network shows relied so heavily on a single character. The second ask was trickier. “We said to [Moonves], ‘The only thing we don’t want to do is a family in a living room with four cameras.’” It was 1992, the golden age of families in living rooms: Blossom, Roseanne, Full House, Home Improvement, Family Matters, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Networks were minting money with these multicamera comedies, and not much else. If you weren’t a family in a living room, then you’d better be football.

Thus came Bright/Kauffman/Crane’s next show, and first major flop: Family Album. It was one of two series they developed during their first year with Warner Bros., the other being Couples—a single-camera comedy about three couples living in the same apartment in New York City. That show, they said, was the obvious winner. It flowed right out of them, Crane recalled: “We wrote it in, like, a week! We love it… It’s smart, it’s single-camera, it’s got everything we want.” Family Album, on the other hand, was multicamera, family-focused, and in terms of writing, “[like] pulling teeth.” No one wanted a show like Couples, no matter how good it was. They wanted, as one network executive told them, “a white-collar Roseanne.”

Backed into the living-room corner, they did their best. “We did everything right. We drew on our own lives. It was about this family from Philadelphia. We had characters based on our parents…and yet, for some reason, the DNA was wrong, and it was incredibly hard to write.” Still, Couples was passed over,3 while Family Album was picked up and ran on CBS. For six weeks.

Family Album was no one’s dream project, but its cancellation was still a blow. “Around that point we were feeling not so much like the cable wunderkinds anymore,” recalled Bright. “We were more like the cable disappointment.” Dream On had been a hit, but one hit (and a surprise niche hit at that) is a meager track record. “It was interesting to us how fast the hype about you can change. ‘Golden children, eh. You’re golden children with tarnish now.’”

That same year, The Powers That Be, a show that Kauffman and Crane had created (but hadn’t run) for Norman Lear was canceled, too. While they’d hardly written a word of it beyond the pilot episode, they were still credited creators, and thus now had another failure with their name on it.

Back to the drawing board, again. Sitting in their office at Warner Bros., the three ex–New Yorkers started thinking back to the days before they came out to Hollywood, when they were just out of college and a little lost—but not alone. Kauffman and Crane thought about their old friends from the theater days, and how they’d banded together as a makeshift family, in those years before they’d made their own families, before careers had taken shape, and adult life was still amorphous. “We were looking at that time when the future was more of a question mark. Maybe ’cause that’s what we were feeling in that moment,” said Kauffman. Maybe there was something there. After all, she thought, “everybody knows that feeling.”

Weeks later, it was done. Kauffman and Crane delivered a seven-page pitch for a show they titled Insomnia Café.4

“This show is about six people in their twenties who hang out at this coffeehouse,” they wrote. “It’s about sex, love, relationships, careers…a time in your life when everything is possible, which is really exciting and really scary.”

The following pages went on to describe potential storylines and character sketches—all drawn from friends in their social circle back in New York, with a little bit of their twentysomething selves thrown in. But ultimately, it was that single and incredibly simple concept that sold the show: “It’s about friendship, because when you’re young and single in the city, your friends are your family.” It was straightforward and endearing, and in 1994, it was exactly what NBC was looking for.

“We wanted to reach that young, urban audience, those kids starting out on their own,” remembered Warren Littlefield, former president of NBC Entertainment, in his 2012 book, Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV. He’d been studying the ratings one morning, reviewing numbers in the major markets—New York, Dallas, Los Angeles, Saint Louis. “I found myself thinking about the people in those cities, particularly the twentysomethings just beginning to make their way… It was very expensive to live in those places as well as a tough emotional journey. It would be a lot easier if you did it with a friend.” He’d been hunting for a Friends-esque concept ever since, “but none of the contenders had ever lived up to our hopes.” Then Kauffman and Crane showed up.

In the historic pilot season of 1994, their pitch remains legendary. “The pitch was like two old friends telling you a story. The jokes were already there,” added Karey Burke, who was an NBC executive at the time. “It was theater.”

It’s a testament to just how good the pair was at pitching that it was such an easy sell. Because, beyond that famous log line and the six character sketches, they really didn’t have much else—including a plot or even a solid premise, according to Crane. “I remember pitching it and we were saying, ‘Yeah, and basically we’re just in their lives. And here are the six characters, and they’re specific. But yeah, we’re in and out of their apartments and they go about doing stuff. That’s your show.’”

NBC bought it—not only a script, but a pilot, as well. At the very least, this would not be another idea sold, bought, and left unproduced. The show’s title was changed from Insomnia Café to Friends Like Us,5 and Kauffman and Crane sat down to write. In three days flat, the script was done. As with Couples, the writing came easily and it came out good. But Couples had also been a great pilot that went bust, so they wrote this first script with the understanding that it most likely would be the last. “At the point where you’re doing pilots,” said Crane, “you don’t think you’re going to spend the next ten years of your life doing this.” No one was all that worried about answering questions like: If Monica is a chef, then why is she home for dinner every night? Why doesn’t anyone lock their doors in this downtown Manhattan apartment building (except when someone is locked out for storyline purposes)? How the hell did a recently homeless, evolution denialist, aura-cleansing weirdo like Phoebe wind up hanging out with these bourgeois squares? As Crane pointed out, at this stage of the process, it just doesn’t matter much because, in all likelihood, your show won’t survive long enough to answer these questions. “We had absolutely no idea what this show was going to be. For us, it was just another pilot. We’d just had a series canceled. We were thinking we’d never work again, so we were scrambling… [It] was feeling good, but it was just another pilot. Or it was just another pilot until Jimmy Burrows wants to direct it. Excuse me, James Burrows.”

If you’ve watched any network television programming since 1975, then James Burrows is a name you’ve likely seen thousands of times, but never noticed. He is a director and producer, who has worked on shows including but not limited to: Taxi, Cheers, Wings, Will & Grace, Frasier, Dharma & Greg, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and NewsRadio. As Littlefield describes him in Top of the Rock, Burrows is “the most successful director in television comedy—ever.” After reading Kauffman and Crane’s pilot script, Littlefield called him up. “I literally had no time,” Burrows later told the New York Times. “But I read it, and I said, ‘I can’t let anyone else do this.’” He agreed to direct the pilot, but nothing more.