The co-creators of Pals revealed that they needed to combat for Monica Geller’s storyline within the first episode, which featured her sleeping with somebody on a primary date.
Practically 30 years after the beloved present premiered, David Crane and Marta Kauffman lately advised The Occasions UK that an NBC govt needed to vary Monica’s (Courteney Cox) plot within the pilot, which aired in September 1994.
“The guy who was in charge said: ‘We’re not going to like Monica because [in the pilot] she sleeps with a guy on the first date,’ We made the argument that it makes her sympathetic,” Crane recalled, including that the community even looped within the viewers, hoping they might again their opinion.
“The network, in trying to prove that the audience wouldn’t like Monica if she sleeps with a guy on the first date, distributed a little questionnaire to the audience at our dress rehearsal,” Crane stated. “And it was so skewed. The question was like: ‘When Monica sleeps with a guy on her first date, is she a) a slut or b) a harlot?’”
Nevertheless, the viewers had their very own ideas and it wasn’t one of many choices listed on the questionnaire. “People wrote in saying: ‘No, it’s fine,’” Crane recounted.
In “The Pilot,” additionally titled “The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate,” Monica sleeps with a co-worker nicknamed “Paul the wine guy” on their first date after he claims he hasn’t had intercourse with anybody in two years, since his final relationship ended. However Monica learns later within the episode that he lied to get her to sleep with him.
All through the Emmy-winning present’s 10-season run, the reside studio viewers performed an enormous function in its success, together with serving to with a few of its storylines, specifically Monica and Chandler Bing’s (Matthew Perry) relationship.
“We thought it would be a one-night stand,” Kauffman advised The Occasions UK of the episode the place their characters hook up in London earlier than Ross Geller (David Schwimmer) and Emily Waltham’s (Helen Baxendale) marriage ceremony. “But they received such a strong reaction from the audience in London that it actually altered where we were going with the storyline.”
