‘Friends’ Co-creator Marta Kauffman Spills Her Two Regrets About The Show

Television series Friends was one of the most successful shows of the 90s and early 2000s, and many consider the series to be iconic. In honor of the show’s 25th anniversary since its premiere, co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane held a panel on the show. During the event, Kauffman spilled on her two big regrets of the series, per Page Six.

Friends centered around a group of six friends living in New York, and soon found a huge cult following. Characters include Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel, Courtney Cox’s Monica, and Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe. The three men were David Schwimmer as Ross, Matt LeBlanc as Joey, and Matthew Perry as Chandler.

The gang often got into comedic hijinks, as they navigated life while sipping coffee from iconic coffee shop Central Perk.

Both of Kauffman’s regrets centered around two plot points, and they surprisingly also centered around one character.

Kauffman said that her first regret was an episode called “The Stalker” from season three. It is about Phoebe falling for a man who was stalking her twin sister, Ursula.

“We did a lot of rewriting on that to make that work,” Kauffman confessed.

The second one once again concerned Phoebe. Kauffman admitted that she disliked a plotline in season two where Phoebe got chickenpox. She then passed the virus to a character named Ryan (played by Charlie Sheen) who was in the Navy and would go on dates with the quirky blonde when he was in New York.

Meanwhile, Crane said that while he did not have specific plot lines that he regretted, he does sometimes cringe when he catches the show on television.

“It’s one of those things where, I don’t watch the show at home, but occasionally if we’re traveling or whatever, it will be on and sometimes I’ll see something … and it will be like, ‘Wow, that actually holds up,’ and then there are definitely times where I’ll go, ‘Really? We went with that?'” he confessed.

As the 25th anniversary of the show’s start comes up, many new details have been released about the series. For example, the show almost originally had seven main characters, as previously reported by The Inquisitr.

In his new book Generation Friends, pop culture historian Saul Austerlitz claimed that NBC suggested to Kauffman and Crane that they add “an older secondary character” like a policeman to balance out the rest of the 20s-something cast.

Though the pair wrote the character into the pilot script, they hated the result, and eventually convinced executives to ax the addition.