Gary Null/NBCU Photo BankWe are officially done asking for a Friends reunion.
Or more specifically we're done asking for a Friends revival. The cast can reunite all they want, but as they've all said many times, the show will never be revived.
In an interview about her career for Rolling Stone, co-creator Marta Kauffman was asked why she's so adamant that the show will never be revived, and she spoke only the truth.
"There are several reasons. One, the show is about a time in your life when your friends are your family. It's not that time anymore. All we'd be doing is putting those six actors back together, but the heart of the show would be gone. Two, I don't know what good it does us. The show is doing just fine, people love it. [A reunion] could only disappoint. 'The One Where Everyone's Disappointed.'"
Where is the lie, we ask?
All 10 seasons are available on Netflix (and will be at least through the end of this year, before they very possibly move to the new Warner Media streaming service, but that's another story), meaning it's pretty hard to run out of episodes to watch. The show's easy availability also means that a whole new generation of kids can now watch it, which is partly what has generated the reunion questions.
"It's a comfort-food show," Kauffman said of why it's still so popular. "These are trying times, and certain people want the comfort food rather than the difficult, mean-spirited kind of show. It's warm, it's cozy, [the characters] love each other. What's not to love about that?"
Kauffman also opened up about the moments she and co-creator David Crane knew that the show was a hit.
"There were two moments. The first was our very first rehearsal when we had all six of them onstage for the first time and they read the scene in the coffeehouse. I got chills up and down my spine and thought, "This is special. There is something about these six, this script for them, that's special,'" Kaufman recalled. "The other was when I was walking down one of the main drags here in a Friends jacket and someone stopped me on the street to ask what was going to happen to Ross and Rachel. Lots of articles had come out and we were seeing them on magazine covers in airports, but that's the stuff that got to me more—hearing it in conversation in a restaurant, my rabbi asking me about it, when it started reaching me in such strange connections."
Kauffman also co-created Grace & Frankie, and is working on a few other new projects, including a TNT pilot and an adaptation of the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Friends aired on NBC from 1994 to 2004.
E! and NBC are both part of the NBC Universal family.