Newsgroup: it.fan.tv.friends
Titolo: To be continued?

IT AIN'T OVER - THE FIGHT TO SAVE FRIENDS
Well, don't get out your handkerchiefs just yet -- or book the living
room sofa in advance for a spring 2003 finale. Signals from New York
City to Los Angeles increasingly suggest Friends will be back for one
more season. Why? Because the cast members still like it -- and NBC
still needs it. "We don't know for sure yet," says one source close to
the show, "but I'd be very surprised if we didn't come back" for a
10th season. 
No deal has yet been struck, and all sides -- the stars, NBC and
Warner Bros., which produces the show (and is, like PEOPLE, owned by
AOL Time Warner) -- admit things could fall apart. But the sense of a
shift toward renewal is hard to miss. When Tonight Show host Jay Leno
asked LeBlanc if he'd be up for a 10th season on Oct. 16, he answered,
"Uh, I would . . ." At a children's charity benefit last week in L.A.
honoring NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker and wife Caryn,
Kudrow read a tribute off a TelePrompTer, skipping the line, "That
doesn't mean Friends is coming back this year." Asked point-blank
before the event if the show will be back, she said, "I don't know.
But I hope so." 
This time around, a bigger paycheck doesn't seem to be the sole
motivation for the stars, who in previous seasons threatened to bolt
en masse unless their salaries were hiked from $40,000 to $100,000 on
up to $750,000, and who committed to a ninth season last year only
after winning paychecks of $1 million each per episode. "Money? No,
that's not an issue," says one show insider. "They've got the money."
After nine seasons of undiminished success, the stars of Friends would
seem to be no more capable of being spooked, intimidated, cajoled,
threatened, bluffed, buttered up or snookered into making a deal any
more than would six 800-pound gorillas. After all, when it was
announced last winter that there would be no Friends beyond 2003, the
cast sensed the time probably had come to move on. This fall's Emmy
wins -- Aniston's for best actress and the show for best comedy --
seemed to put the right bow on the package. And they've been anxious
not to overstay their welcome. "They want to go out on a high note,"
says a friend of Cox's. "Coach was on for 100 seasons, and no one even
noticed it went off the air. They don't want that."
So why would they stay? In the end, the Friends may simply have
realized that life looks pretty good from the vantage of those
overstuffed chairs in the Central Perk, the show's main set. As
LeBlanc said in October, "It's always a home run, every day." Kudrow,
for one, has found sitcom work a stress-free way to raise Julian, 4,
her son with advertising-exec husband Michel Stern, 45. "It's a great
gig for me," she said recently. "It's closer and often better than a
regular 9-to-5. I get to take my son to school and have dinner with
him." The cast works only four days a week and only from August to
April. That can't have escaped the attention of Cox, wed since 1999 to
David Arquette, or Aniston, wed since 2000 to Brad Pitt. Both women
have talked about starting families of their own but had planned to
wait out the series. "Yes, absolutely it will happen," Aniston told
PEOPLE in August, "but probably not for a while. Probably Friends will
end, close that chapter." 
Aniston, more than any of the Friends, might seem primed to leave the
nest. She earned marvelous reviews in this summer's film The Good Girl
and shot a comedy, Bruce Almighty, with Jim Carrey. She managed to fit
both into her Friends schedule -- so why split? Conversely, LeBlanc
commuted to Prague last season to shoot the recently released All the
Queen's Men -- a film whose dismal performance might make a hit like
Friends all the more attractive. Says Scrubs star John C. McGinley,
whose show follows Friends in the Thursday-night lineup: "Those kids
own those roles." 
And, true to the title, friends they are. "We'll spend the whole day
at work and then get out and go get something to eat," says Cox with a
laugh. "And I say, 'What are we doing? We should split up and go
somewhere else. Let's see some other people.' But we don't." The girls
"spend more time with each other than they do anybody else," says
Cox's friend. "Jen and Courteney are best buds." (LeBlanc, on the
other hand, currently is engaged to model Melissa McKnight, and
Schwimmer has been squiring Playboy model Carla Alapont, 24, around
L.A.) The whole gang pulled even closer together during Perry's stints
in rehab in 1997 and 2001, as well as his 2000 hospitalization for
alcohol-related pancreatitis. "Hard doesn't even begin to describe
it," said Kudrow in August. "When Matthew was sick, it was not fun. We
were just hopelessly standing on the sidelines. We were hurting a
lot." Hurting in a different way is Zucker, 37, the former wunderkind
who ran the Today show before heading to NBC's L.A. office in late
2000. His quest to save the show is born of love and need: With ad
rates of $400,000 per 30-second commercial and domination of the
18-to-49 demographic, "Friends has not only made Thursday the most
lucrative night in television," says one network executive, "the show
has become NBC's promotional platform." It's also a show without an
heir apparent. Frasier is aging, and NBC hasn't launched a Top 10
sitcom since Will & Grace. 
Zucker, who set all the Friends speculation going last July when he
said it was too soon "to put the nail in the coffin," has made no
secret of his quest. He's dared the Friends cast to pick anything --
anything -- and he'd eat it on Fear Factor. At last week's charity
event, he even bid $10,000 for a Friends walk-on role (and got it).
Asked during the evening about his more serious bids to win back the
show, his wife, Caryn, laughed: "Believe me, he's trying!" 
Zucker's biggest problem, ironically, is the show's success. It's the
laws of sitcomonomics. Warner Bros., which pays the sky-high Friends'
salaries, charges NBC close to $7 million per episode. But the studio,
which will not disclose any exact figures, says that income doesn't
begin to cover all the costs of producing the show. The only way
Warner Bros. can recoup its outlay is by reselling the reruns through
the practice called syndication: Local stations around the country
fork over millions for the old Friends episodes. But those stations
don't contract to buy more than 200 episodes -- that's plenty for
their vaults -- meaning there's no incentive for Warner Bros. to keep
cranking out Friends, which broadcast its 200th episode Nov. 7. 
Instead, NBC has to come up with the big bucks to keep it afloat. Can
Zucker do it? Not everyone is sure. "Doubtful, very doubtful," insists
one studio exec. Zucker says details won't be finalized or announced
before January or even February -- a potential headache for the show's
13 writers. The prospect of an added season dropping from the sky and
mucking up their story arcs, says a Friends insider, "scares the
dickens out of them." 
Cox, for one, says she hasn't felt the sad pangs of nostalgia that
made Jennifer Aniston weep that day in August. "That will probably
happen after Christmas," she says, "when you go into that post-holiday
decline." Or maybe, just maybe, not.
-- 
j./You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit 
down your neck.
Still alive (very alive) on Wednesday at 15:32:02 - 
http://www.iftf.it

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