‘Friends’ writer exposes what it was like working on the show, and it’s not a glowing review

Even though the iconic sitcom ‘Friends’ has been off the air for almost 20 years, it is still considered a pop culture touchstone to this day. The ‘Friends’ reunion was one of the most hotly anticipated TV cast reunions in history, and the cast, made up of Courteney Cox, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew Perry, Matt LeBlanc, and David Schwimmer, are still asked about the show in interviews.

Of course, with all the good, comes some controversy. A few years back, we learned that a former writer  – a woman – accused the writer’s room of sexual harassment for the constant focus on sexuality in the male-dominated writers room. Now, another writer from the “Friends” writers room, also a woman, has written an account of what her experience was like. Although she doesn’t allege sexual harassment, she still says she was deeply “unhappy” working for the legendary show.

Writer Patty Lin has written a new memoir “End Credits: How I Broke Up With Hollywood,” and an excerpt was published in TIME. In it, Lin asserts that she was very aware of the lack of diversity within the writer’s room, something that has been pushed to the fore of late, as the show has been criticized for its lack of diversity behind and in front of the camera. When she was hired, she was one of only six women in the room, and the only minority, making her question if she was there for her merits or because of affirmative action.

She writes of the long, exhausting hours of working in the writers room, the lack of personal time, sleeping in the room until dawn to get a joke right, the constant pressure to churn out good lines, and the fallout when a script she was proud of was completely rewritten until nothing she contributed was in the final draft.

But some of her most telling passages details how the famous cast, which she dubs the Big Stars, ripped apart the scripts, or even tanked the jokes, if they didn’t like what they read.

"At first, I was excited about table reads because I got to be in the same room as the cast, who were Big Stars," she writes, but the novelty wore off quickly.

"The actors seemed unhappy to be chained to a tired old show when they could be branching out, and I felt like they were constantly wondering how every given script would specifically serve them," she said.

"They all knew how to get a laugh, but if they didn't like a joke, they seemed to deliberately tank it, knowing we'd rewrite it. Dozens of good jokes would get thrown out just because one of them had mumbled the line through a mouthful of bacon."

She goes on to say that the actors were so protective of their characters, that it forced the writers into rewrites into the early hours of the next morning, only because the actors refused to “sell” the jokes they were telling.

“This was the actors’ first opportunity to voice their opinions, which they did vociferously,” she writes of the blocking sessions on set. “They rarely had anything positive to say, and when they brought up problems, they didn’t suggest feasible solutions. Seeing themselves as guardians of their characters, they often argued that they would never do or say such-and-such. That was occasionally helpful, but overall, these sessions had a dire, aggressive quality that lacked all the levity you’d expect from the making of a sitcom.”

Lin also writes that showrunners David Crane and Marta Kaufmann were incredibly intimidating to her, and while she yearned to make them laugh with her jokes, it almost rarely happened. She writes, “I was scared of them both, for different reasons. David, an impossible-to-please workaholic, was always looking for a better line or joke. Behind his soft-spoken demeanor, he seemed to be judging everyone with eagle eyes.”

Lin also writes that Crane and Kaufmann never stood up for the writer's script in the face of the actors tanking the jokes. “David and Marta never said, ‘This joke is funny. The actor just needs to sell it.’” She also writes that when they needed to come up with jokes at the last minute during filming when their jokes didn’t land with the audience, Crane “only listened to pitches from his three go-to joke writers—all of whom happened to be men.”

She does write of some highs as well from her time there. In one episode she was also cast as an extra, and star David Schwimmer was directing that episode. She writes that not only was he kind to her, he called her by name, which made her feel like part of the team. She also writes about attending the People’s Choice Awards. But in the end, when she was fired after only one season in the writer’s room, she writes that she, “felt invisible… mortified and indignant.”

So far, none of the famous “Friends” cast has publicly replied to her assertions, and both Crane and Kaufmann declined to comment to TIME.

You can read Lin’s entire excerpt here.