Quick Links
Shooting a scripted collection in front of a are living studio audience can bring an excessively distinctive set of problems to a production.
Most of those would have to do with how the audience interacts with or reacts to the material being performed. For example, they could cheer a little too much when a favourite persona enters a scene.
On the different hand, writers of such shows have benefited in the past through leveraging the reactions of the reside audience to gauge how other folks looking at from house are most probably to reply to their subject material.
Most sitcoms - previous and present - are most often shot in entrance of a live studio audience. NBC's classic collection Friends falls into this category as smartly. So a hit had been the manufacturers in executing the structure of the display, that it lasted a decade on television.
This would be an unbelievable success for any TV display anyway, even supposing it in all probability also contributed to numerous the forged participants pronouncing that they have forgotten shooting some scenes in the series.
Courteney Cox - who performed the de facto chief of the titular crew of friends, Monica Geller - published recently that the writers would indeed trade some components of the display depending on how the live audience reacted.
Who Were The Main Writers On 'Friends'?
In maximum instances, there are normally very many writers who give a contribution the conceptualizing and scripting of quite a lot of episodes of a TV display. This is particularly so in the case of a sequence that lasted as long as Friends did on air.
For maximum TV shows, each and every episode can have a different creator, and the similar applies to directors. Friends was the brainchild of manufacturers David Crane (who is also identified for developing the sitcom Episodes for Showtime and BBC Two), and Marta Kauffman.
Kauffman is also the brains behind Netflix's groundbreaking comedy series Grace and Frankie, whose final season is set to change into available to circulation on the on-line platform this weekend.
Krane and Kauffman wrote a large number of the episodes of the display in the early seasons, they usually predictably joined forces to pen The Last One, the two-episode finale of Friends in 2004. Other frequent writers on the show integrated Jeffrey Astrof, Mike Sikowitz, and Alexa Junge.
Courteney Cox Had High Praise For The Writers Of 'Friends'
Courteney Cox was once speaking to YouTube megastar Sean Evans in an episode of his Hot Ones show in March this 12 months when she addressed the question of jokes being rewritten on Friends.
"How would you quantify the impact of shooting in front of a live studio audience?" Evans posed. "You know, I saw the interview with executive producer Kevin Bright, where he talked about how writers... like if a joke didn't hit in the live studio audience, writers would workshop and rewrite the joke in real time."
Cox responded in the affirmative, after which went on to sing the praises of the writers' staff on the show. "Yeah. These writers were so incredible that when we were taping the show, the reason why Friday nights would take so [long was] there would be no high voice, 'Oh, it was good, or it's okay.' It had to be the best," she defined.
In a separate interview, Kevin Bright himself confirmed that they might typically shoot the identical material in entrance of different audiences to sample reactions from a wide demographic of other folks.
How Did The Cast Of 'Friends' Feel About Shooting In Front Of A Live Studio Audience?
"We had this whole way to [taping Friends], Kevin Bright told Saratoga Living magazine in 2020. "We would shoot it thrice, nonstop, in front of 3 different audiences, and that approach, the most conceivable other folks may see the display."
It was an approach that really helped the writing, but not everyone in the cast enjoyed it. Matthew Perry played Chandler Bing in the series, and he particularly felt that having a live audience added to the pressure of performing his scenes.
"To me, I felt like I used to be going to die if [the audience] didn’t laugh," Perry said during the Friends reunion special episode that was filmed and aired last year.
"It’s no longer healthy evidently, however I might on occasion say a line they usually wouldn’t laugh," he continued. "I would sweat and just go into convulsions if I didn’t get the laugh I was meant to get. I'd freak out."
This came as a bit of a surprise to the rest of the cast, as Perry had never disclosed his fears to them while they were filming.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTErZ%2Bippeoe6S7zGibopxdqbWmedaroK2doqh6sLqMn6minZ6ZwG6%2BxLCpoqyVYsGpsYyjpqSdo2K2p3nToZxmmaWZtqa6wp5knaGUo8FuuMCunqFn