Fourteen years after Friends came to an end and we're still finding out new secrets. With executive producer and director Kevin S. Bright being in London (Baby!) for Friendsfest, this week alone, we've discovered the major Friends plotline that was never meant to be included in the show and the one Friends storyline that Matt LeBlanc was seriously unhappy with.
But there's more where that came from: the latest shocker? Season 10 of the well-loved sitcom almost never happened.
According to Bright, the NBC show's ninth season was originally going to be its last. However, a tenth series wasn't completely ruled out, so the writers were "frozen" and didn't feel able to craft an appropriate ending to the comedy.
"We started out on season 9 thinking that that would be the last season," Kevin said. "We were prepared to end the series in season 9. But at the last minute, things fortunately happened, and there was a season 10."
He continued: "In season 9, basically, we were frozen. We didn't know what to do, because we didn't know how it was going to turn out. So no, there wasn't another version of the ending of season 9."
So, what if season 10 of Friends never existed? We'd have missed Phoebe's wedding, we'd have never got to watch Monica and Chandler adopt the twins, and, most importantly of all, we'd have never had Ross's L-O-V-E breakdown.
The former producer also opened up about working on the last ever episodes of the beloved US sitcom, admitting it was "hard". "Everybody was just trying to get that last bit of Friends delight, but almost all of the actors broke down and cried in one scene or another," he told Digital Spy. "So there was a lot of stopping to mop up, and get the redness out of the eyes!"
He added: "The mood on the set was a feeling of great accomplishment on one hand, but [also] a feeling of real sadness. We had spent the last 10 years with this group of people. There were over 120 people working on the show, and we saw them for those 10 years far more than we saw our own families. [So] there was a real sadness at the end of it, from just knowing that probably there's never going to be something like this again in our lives. We'll do other television shows, but it's not going to be like this."
In addition, Bright declared that the series has "aged really well", but admitted that he would change a few things if he were to film it again today. "I think, probably, if anything would change about the show, it would just be to reflect more what's going on in the world that's happening today, but not in a topical way – more in a cultural way," he said.
"So I think it would reflect that. But other than that, I don't think much would change. It's a universal story. It was never about gimmicks or aliens or crazy flashback episodes – though we had a couple of those, I guess. It was about simple stories about relationships and people trying to make it in the world – loves won and lost. They're very simple stories when you think about it, that just connect with everybody because that's what our lives are like."
I don't know Kevin, if you ask us, it was pretty perfect.
