Fans who have complained about the lack of diversity on Friends are met with a response from Lisa Kudrow.

Lisa Kudrow, who plays Phoebe Buffay on the NBC sitcom Friends, has spoken in on the controversy surrounding the lack of racial and ethnic diversity that has persisted during the show’s entire run of ten seasons.

In a recent interview with Daily Beast, Kudrow didn’t go so far as to excuse or justify the show’s levels of cultural representation; rather, she simply pointed out that it was a story about co-series creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane’s time spent in college.

Kudrow’s comments were made in light of the fact that she didn’t go so far as to excuse or justify the show’s levels of cultural representation.

According to the 59-year-old actor, “Well, I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis [University in Massachusetts] and wrote about their lives after college.” He went on to say that “for shows especially when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know.”

She went on to argue that while it is obviously important to highlight stories from various ethnic groups, she believes that they had “no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color.”

She also stated that “at that time, the big problem that [she] was seeing was, ‘Where’s the apprenticeship?’” – which refers to ensuring that people of color are hired in roles across roles across TV production.

Kauffman herself has previously spoken out about the lack of representation on the show, which ran from 1994 to 2003. She stated that she was “embarrassed” that she “didn’t know better 25 years ago,” and she even pledged $4 million to the African and African American studies department at the university where she previously taught.

Even the much-anticipated reunion event that took place in 2021 was met with criticism after a very small number of persons of color participated on the HBO broadcast. These individuals may have been former cast members or one of the several celebrities who appeared as special guests.

Friends may go down in history as one of the most successful television comedies of all time, and it may have been a fairly truthful representation of the writers’ college years; however, the concept of portraying a New York that contains very few people of black, African-American, Latino, Asian, or any other minority ethnic group seems rather unrealistic.

 

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