Generation Friends: An Inside Look at the Show That Defined a Television Era - Softcover

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Saul Austerlitz is the author of four previous books, including Just a Shot Away and Sitcom. His work has been published by The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Slate, and the Los Angeles Times. He is a graduate of Yale and NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and is an adjunct professor of writing and comedy history at NYU.

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Chapter 1

Insomnia Cafe

A TV Show Is Born

One day in late 1993, a young television writer named Marta Kauffman was driving along Beverly Boulevard when she passed a funky coffee shop called Insomnia CafŽ, located across the street from an Orthodox synagogue. Full of lumpy couches and garish chairs, strings of Christmas lights, and towering bookshelves piled high with mismatched books, the place was a beacon calling to the artists and slackers of the Fairfax-La Brea area. Kauffman, who lived nearby in Hancock Park, was trawling for ideas that could be transformed into stories for the upcoming pilot season.

Along with her writing partner David Crane, Kauffman had created the groundbreaking HBO series Dream On and, after leaving the show, had been fruitlessly seeking network success. Last pilot season had been disappointing, and it was important to the two writers that 1994 be a better year for them than 1993 had been. Something about Insomnia CafŽ grabbed her attention, and she began to mull over an intriguing idea. Could a comedy series set in a coffee shop appeal to viewers? Kauffman and Crane had only recently moved to California from New York, and found that they missed their old crew of friends from Manhattan terribly. They had spent all their spare time together, done everything together, served as a kind of surrogate family. What if they put together a show about that?

Sometime in the mid-1980s, Warren Littlefield discovered something new about television. The NBC executive, protŽgŽ to network president Brandon Tartikoff, was attending an advertising meeting, and the research department displayed a gridded chart showing the relative audience shares for two shows: CBSÕs Murder, She Wrote and NBCÕs own St. Elsewhere. At the bottom left, Murder, She Wrote, featuring Angela Lansbury as a crime-solving mystery novelist, a fixture in the Nielsen top ten, and at the top right, NBCÕs quirky hospital drama, beloved by critics but lagging noticeably in the ratings. The message was clear: NBCÕs niche effort was having its clock cleaned. What came next changed LittlefieldÕs entire career.

If you think Murder, She Wrote is kicking St. Elsewhere's ass, the researcher continued, you're right-when it comes to total audience. Now a new graph replaced the initial chart. This one showed the fees networks charged advertisers for their shows. Quirky, niche, never-gonna-be-a-hit St. Elsewhere made NBC more money than the far more successful Murder, She Wrote made for CBS. NBC was able to charge more for its thirty-second spots than CBS charged for theirs.

And why? The answer lay in a steady shift in advertisers' interests. Advertisers increasingly preferred younger eyeballs. Reaching a mass audience was too diffuse and too unpredictable. Advertisers preferred a targeted approach, pushing their sports cars and light beers to youthful viewers, whom they believed to be more likely to purchase them. The ratings were no less important today than they had been yesterday, but the youth market-broadly speaking, viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine-was becoming the only market that really mattered. (Older people, the thinking went, could be safely ignored, being unlikely to buy the razors and sports cars and beer advertisers hoped to sell.) Littlefield understood that the ground was shifting in network television.

Littlefield had been studying government at American University in Washington, DC, during the final years of Richard Nixon's presidency, imagining himself rescuing American democracy from unconstitutional knavery. When Nixon resigned, the urgency of Littlefield's cause dissipated, and he switched to studying psychology. Before beginning a graduate program, he wanted to accrue some work experience and was offered a job by a hometown friend as a gofer at a production company.

After stints as a location scout and an assistant editor, Littlefield was acquiring properties of his own for production. He was feeding original movies to the gaping maw of the networks, which had approximately three hundred such slots to fill on their yearly calendars. One such effort, an East Africa-set adventure called The Last Giraffe, was selected by The Hollywood Reporter as one of the ten best TV movies of 1979, and Littlefield decided it was time to relocate to Los Angeles. He soon took up a job at NBC in comedy development and began his meteoric rise at the network.

Just a few years after the St. Elsewhere epiphany, Littlefield was named the president of entertainment at NBC, replacing Tartikoff. Littlefield was inheriting a network that was simultaneously flourishing and endangered. Under the tutelage of the highly esteemed Tartikoff, NBC had dominated the 1980s with series like Cheers, The Cosby Show, and L.A. Law. Tartikoff had been skeptical about a new series from two comedians named Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David ("too New York and too Jewish," said the New York Jew) but developed the acerbic, high-concept, defiantly unlikable Seinfeld anyway.

Now Littlefield had succeeded Tartikoff and was watching as the network's most beloved series were leaving the air. The Cosby Show had ended, Cheers was ending, and NBC's historic run of dominance on Thursday nights was running the risk of coming to an end. NBC needed to develop some new shows, and Littlefield's newfound fixation on younger audiences found him constructing a mental graph of his own. The x-axis was the mass market; the y-axis was the youth audience. Littlefield was aiming to simultaneously maximize both, creating shows that were appealing to younger viewers without turning away older audiences.

As Littlefield was pondering his future audience, Bill Clinton was close to wrapping up his first year as president and soon to face a wipeout in the 1994 midterms, in which Republicans would gain fifty-four seats and make Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House. The Soviet Union had collapsed two years prior, leaving the United States as the sole world superpower. Democracy had seemingly won its titanic struggle with world communism without firing a shot. The American way of life was ascendant.

The sports world was about to be rocked by the news that, for the first time in ninety years, there would be no World Series played that fall, due to a labor strike. Quentin Tarantino won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for his neo-Godardian crime film Pulp Fiction, which resuscitated the moribund career of John Travolta, and the dominant film of the summer would be the overpraised, conservative Forrest Gump, in which Tom Hanks's title character was present at much of postwar American history while serving as proof that all was as it should be. Independent film was ascendant, with Miramax, run by the later-to-be-disgraced Harvey Weinstein, leading a phalanx of new voices with films like The Crying Game. In the mid-1990s, film was still considered the primary visual medium of the American arts, attracting exciting new voices like Tarantino, Todd Haynes, John Singleton, and Allison Anders. Television, by comparison, while it had produced exciting new series like Seinfeld and NYPD Blue, was considered a backwater, a place you went when the movies didn't work out, whose audience was far less discerning than film's.

Meanwhile, a coffee company that had originally been started by two teachers and a writer in Seattle had begun to expand beyond the Pacific Northwest. Starbucks had opened stores in Portland and Chicago, and then targeted California, tackling San Francisco and Los Angeles. The company had gone from eleven stores in 1987 to one hundred sixty-one stores only five years later. Coffee was suddenly big...