Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman is making amends.
For years, the showrunner dismissed critics who said the NBC series wasn't diverse enough, but now, she sees they were right. "Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy," Kauffman told The Los Angeles Times June 29. "It's painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know better 25 years ago."
In the past, Kauffman felt like the series, which ran from 1994 to 2004, was being called out for no reason, saying that it was "difficult and frustrating" to understand why people were so critical.
It's only in recent years that she's come to understand the importance of representation on-screen. "It was after what happened to George Floyd that I began to wrestle with my having bought into systemic racism in ways I was never aware of," Kauffman explained. "That was really the moment that I began to examine the ways I had participated. I knew then I needed to course-correct."
Kauffman's efforts to make amends now include a $4 million donation to Brandeis University' African and African American studies department. As she said, "I'm finally, literally putting my money where my mouth is."
In addition, she hopes to facilitate increased diversity on the next set she finds herself working on. "I want to make sure from now on in every production I do that I am conscious in hiring people of color and actively pursue young writers of color," she said. "I want to know I will act differently from now on. And then I will feel unburdened."
As for the criticism surrounding the recent Friends reunion and its lack of self-awareness, Kauffman felt it wasn't the right time or place to bring up the diversity issue. "I don't know how the two were related," she told the L.A. Times. "And I also don't know how we could have addressed it in that context of that reunion, going into all the things we did wrong."
Kauffman isn't the only Friends alum to be critical of the series. David Schwimmer previously shared that while he was proud of progressive episodes featuring same-sex couples, he felt the show didn't do enough to uplift Black actors.
"I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of color," he told The Guardian in 2020. "One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part."
It's a sentiment echoed by Lisa Kudrow. "It would not be an all-white cast, for sure," she told The Sunday Times when asked how the show would look in 2020. "To me, [Friends] should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong."