Since Friends came to an end in 2004, fans of the show have stopped at nothing to try and bring the show back.
Despite all the campaigning, it looks like the dream of a Friends reboot is dead in the water.
Speaking at the Friends’ 25th anniversary panel at the Tribeca TV Festival last week, the show’s creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane said they’ll never do a reunion show or a reboot, no matter how much money is on the table.
Credit: Photo by Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
“We will not be doing a reunion show, we will not be doing a reboot,” Kauffman said. “There are two reasons for that. One of them is, the reason we won’t be doing a reunion is this is a show about that time of your life when your friends are your family, and once you start having family, that changes.”
“It wouldn’t be at what’s at the heart of the show. The other reason is, it’s not going to be what we did.”
Crane added, “we did the show we wanted to do. We got it right and out the bow on it that we wanted to put.”
“As Marta says, if you visited those characters now, it would just have a different DNA and it would just not be the same show. Chances are it wouldn’t be as good of a show. This feels like this is the show, so why go back to the well?”
Kauffman and Crane have a point. There’s a long list of TV reboots that have crashed and burned in spectacular fashion over the past few years, including 2011’s Charlie’s Angels, 2009’s Melrose Place and 2018’s Charmed.
The ill fate of TV reboots hasn’t stopped Friends fans from pushing for a comeback. In 2018, Matthew Perry AKA Chandler Bing told Variety “when I’m asleep, I have this nightmare that we do Friends again, and nobody cares.”
“We do a whole series, we come back, and nobody cares about it. So if anybody asks me, I’m gonna say no. The thing is, we ended on such a high. We can’t beat it. Why would we go and do it again?” he said.
Perry has a point. Perhaps it’s time we all accept that sadly, Friends is never coming back. You know what they say: always leave the party when you’re still having fun.