Friends have been criticized for its lack of diversity, and co-creator Marta Kauffman admits her failure with a $4M apology!!
Friends creators have long been criticized for their absence in variety. The 65-year-old Marta Kauffman at first battled to handle all the troublesome and frustrating reactions of her TV series. She then decided to accept the successful show was being singled out, she told the Los Angeles Times.
However, almost twenty years after the show wrapped, Kauffman started to see the mistake of her methodologies. The television writer says,
“I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years,” Kauffman said in an interview. “Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.”
The well-known show, which ran from 1994 to 2004, highlights a gathering of six white, heterosexual friends living in Greenwich Village. The village was a broadly gay area, in New York, a historically diverse city.
All the 10 years of the show, the comedy show continued to whitewash New York City. The show rarely featured a variety of people. Friends just presented two repeating characters of variety, both of whom were welcomed on as brief love interests for Ross.
Alongside a huge number of different Americans, in 2020 the George Floyd murder pushed Kaufmann to deal with the country’s past and her own part in propagating a system of racism.
She explained that “I knew then I needed to course-correct,”. While trying to redeem herself, Kauffman vowed $4 million to her place of graduation, Brandeis University, to support a supplied seat in the school’s African and African American examinations division, one of the most established in the country.
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The Waltham, Massachusetts-based university announced,
”The Marta F. Kauffman ’78 Professorship in African and African American Studies will support a distinguished scholar with a concentration in the study of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora” and “assist the department to recruit more expert scholars and teachers, map long-term academic and research priorities and provide new opportunities for students to engage in interdisciplinary scholarship,”
“It took me a long time to begin to understand how I internalized systemic racism,” Kauffman told. “I’ve been working really hard to become an ally, an anti-racist. And this seemed to me to be a way that I could participate in the conversation from a white woman’s perspective.”
It was just last year that friends Reunion aired in honor of the iconic sitcom show. The beloved characters and the die-hard fans of the show recalled the discussion on the lack of diversity. However, Kauffman didn’t feel that it was appropriate to bring that up on the show.
She told that she didn’t even understand how those two incidents were related. It was not necessary to address that incident or anything that we did wrong in the context of a reunion. Kauffman has been revealing certain aspects that she regrets from the show.
She says that there are probably a hundred things that could have been different. She further clarified that it was not a conscious decision to choose the white cast.
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However, the co-creator Kevin Bright count down on his decisions for hiring the characters of the friends.
He noted the chemistry between the characters, Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc, and Matthew Perry.
He told the reporter, “I would have been insane not to hire those six actors. What can I say? I wish Lisa was black?”
Kaufmann says she received nothing but love after her $4M pledge. In this case, she is actually putting her money where her mouth is and expecting to make some difference in future conversations.
Furthermore, she said,
“I have to say, after agreeing to this and when I stopped sweating, it didn’t unburden me, but it lifted me up. But until in my next production, I can do it right, it isn’t over. I want to make sure from now on in every production I do that I am conscious of hiring people of color and actively pursuing young writers of color. I want to know if I will act differently from now on. And then I will feel unburdened.”
The incident didn’t unburden her but it actually lifted her. She is expecting that in her next production hopefully, she can make everything right and also be conscious of hiring of all colors and give opportunities to young talents of all races and colors.
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