' when lines were flubbed. She also said writers discussed sexual fantasies about Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox. Kudrow noted she tolerated it because the writers worked hard.
In 1999, former writing assistant Amaani Lyle filed a sexual harassment case, which was dismissed on the grounds that vulgar comments were expected in a creative workplace. Former writer Patty Lin, in her 2023 book, corroborated the toxic atmosphere, saying male colleagues constantly talked about sex and that actors deliberately tanked jokes they disliked. 'Dozens of good jokes would get thrown out just because one of them had mumbled the line through a mouthful of bacon,' Lin wrote.
There was definitely mean stuff going on behind the scenes.
' Kudrow added that writers from her later show The Comeback reported similar experiences in other rooms, suggesting the behaviour was not unique to Friends.
We were recording in front of a live audience of 400, and if you messed up one of these writers’ lines or it didn’t get the perfect response they could be like, ‘Can’t the bitch fucking read? She’s not even trying. She fucked up my line’.
And we know that back in the room the guys would be up late discussing their sexual fantasies about Jennifer and Courteney. It was intense.
It could be brutal, but these guys – and it was mostly men in there – were sitting up until 3am trying to write the show so my attitude was, ‘Say what you like about me behind my back because then it doesn’t matter’.
It’s worth mentioning that the writers who worked on The Comeback had experiences in many other writers’ rooms, and none of this seemed foreign to them. In fact,
captured a kind of innocence