The Friends cast bargained as one, and pay rose to a million an episode
Warner Bros. wanted to negotiate with each Friends star separately. Before season three the six actors refused and bargained as a bloc instead. Their pay climbed from 22,500 dollars an episode to 1 million by the final seasons, and they won a share of syndication money usually reserved for owners.
David Crane and Marta Kauffman started shaping the sitcom late in 1993 under the working title Insomnia Cafe. With Kevin S. Bright they pitched NBC a seven-page treatment, and the show passed through names such as Six of One and Friends Like Us before settling on the obvious one. It was filmed at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank and ran on NBC from 22 September 1994 to 6 May 2004, ten seasons in all.
Crane wanted no single lead. The six actors, among them Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer, protected that balance themselves: they entered the same award categories, asked to be photographed together for magazine covers in the first year, and treated salary as a group matter. They grew so close off camera that Tom Selleck, a recurring guest, said he sometimes felt shut out.
The money followed the unity. Season three paid each star 75,000 dollars per episode, rising step by step to 125,000 in season six, then leaping to 750,000 for seasons seven and eight and 1 million for the last two. That made Aniston, Cox and Kudrow the best-paid television actresses ever. From 2000 the cast also took syndication royalties, a back-end deal that until then had gone mainly to stars who owned their shows, such as Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Cosby.
Audiences rewarded the formula. Every season finished in the top ten of the annual ratings, and the eighth reached first place. Around 52.5 million Americans watched the finale, the most for any single episode of the 2000s. One quiet constant was James Michael Tyler's barista Gunther, who appeared in every season yet was always credited only as a guest.
Source: Friends
