Friends

Many titles were considered and rejected before the show was named as 'Friends'. They included Friends like us', 'Insomnia Cafe' and 'Across the Hall'.

In the early stages of Friends' development, Chandler and Phoebe were just support characters, and the writers considered making Chandler gay. His middle name is Muriel.

Matt Le Blanc was down to his last $11 when he landed his role on Friends.

Before he was cast in Friends, Matt Le Blanc was told by a photographer to go to a dentist and file a tooth as it was longer. Matt couldn't afford $80 for the dentist as he only had $11 left to his name, so he bought three packs of emery boards (Nail files) and filed the tooth himself.

The writers of Friends didn't originally intend for Joey to be dim, but when Matt LeBlanc auditioned for the role, he put a "different spin" on the character, convincing the writers that his being dumb would be a great source of comedy.

Ellen DeGeneres turned down the role of Phoebe Buffay in Friends.

David Schwimmer (Ross) and US Talk-show host Stephen Colbert were in the same improv group at Northwestern University called "The No-Fun Mud Piranhas".

The Friends theme song was originally going to be "Shiny Happy People" by R.E.M. It can actually be heard in the original pilot, Friends Like Us. The theme was eventually changed to "I'll Be There For You" by The Rembrandts.

The pilot episode of Friends premiered on NBC on September 22, 1994.

The estimated cost of Monica's apartment on Friends is $3,500,000.

At the beginning of the series, Monica’s door had #5 on it. The producers later realized that didn’t make sense as Monica lived on a higher floor. They changed her apartment number to 20.

Season two is the only season of Friends where there is no episode on Thanksgiving Day.

Bruce Willis guest starred on the series after losing a bet to Matthew Perry on the set of their movie, The Whole Nine Yards.

Each episode of the last season of Friends cost $10 million.

The iconic Friends title sequences had the six main stars splashing around a mock-up of a fountain in New York City's Central Park as the song played. It turns out the cast hated both the theme tune and fountain dancing. "No one was really a big fan of that theme song," Jennifer Aniston told BBC's The One Show. "We felt it was a little, I don't know, dancing in a pond. A fountain felt sort of odd, but we did it."

There were 236 episodes of Friends in total.

The word "friends" is said in every episode of Friends.

When the final episode of Friends was aired on NBC on May 6, 2004, it attracted 52.46 million viewers, making it the fourth most watched television series finale in US history.

At $2 million per 30-second slot, the 2004 finale episode of Friends had the most expensive ad slots for a non-sports program.

By the end of Friends, Joey owed Chandler about $114, 260.

When Friends ended its 10-season run, the cast and crew were all given a chunk of the sidewalk from outside of Central Perk.

In 2009 a superfan of the show, Steve Misiura from London, watched all 236 episodes of Friends non-stop, without sleeping, in 83 hours and 40 minutes. "I love Friends," said Misiura later, "but this hurt."

Friends-mad Beijing has a Central Perk coffee shop that serves food only mentioned in the show.

Although the show ended in 2004, Friends still brings $1 billion for Warner Bros. every year in royalties. This means each of the six main cast member get $20 million every year doing absolutely nothing.

On October 28, 2023, Los Angeles Police Department officers found Matthew Perry dead in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home; he was 54.