A Friendly Place

I recently read I'll Be There For You* by Kelsey Miller, the story of the sitcom Friends.  The show was a hit from the start, and in all its ten seasons, was never out of the top ten. In fact, after its first season, it was never out of the top five. Perhaps not surprisingly, after leaving the air 15 years ago, it's remained very popular in reruns.  Businesses pay hundreds of millions for the rights.

What did surprise me was the original title.  It's wasn't always called Friends.  Earlier titles include Six Of One and Friends Like Us. It might have been called the latter, except the Ellen sitcom, which started a few months earlier, was first known as These Friends Of Mine and that sounded too similar.

But here's the surprise.  The original title was Insomnia Café.  The creators of the show, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, were driving down Beverly Boulevard when they saw a place called the Insomnia Café and started thinking it would be fun to set a sitcom in a coffeehouse, or at least have it be a main set**.

What's cool about this is I live not too far from the Insomnia Café.  When I first moved to Los Angeles, I would hang out there sometimes.  If someone wanted to meet me, I'd often suggest the Insomnia. And you know what people did there?  Same as in any coffeehouse in LA.  They'd work on their sitcom scripts.

By the way, the book is filled with all sorts of tidbits (the original opening credits for the show, done at the last second at the network's request, was set to "Shiny Happy People"). If you like the show, you'll probably like the book.

*A decent book when it discusses the history of the show, though its constant excursions into political issues wears thin by the end.

**Friends fans know the pilot starts with the gang hanging out in "Central Perk." There was actually resistance from the network over the set.  The suits worried Middle America wouldn't know what a coffeehouse was--why not have these friends meet at a diner, you know, like Seinfeld?