GQ Magazine

March, 1996

Pt. 1

the Comic Angst of David Schwimmer

by Gerri Hirshey

What's a little kiss between friends? In David Schwimmer's case, it's proof that a neurotic guy can get the girl

Dodging four lanes of pitiless traffic, a young woman shuffles across Sunset Boulevard in plastic pedicure slippers. Cotton Ball separate her wet lacquered toes; she's carrying a pair of strappy platform sandals. "Gotta DATE!" she screams at a honking driver. "Gimme a break!"
It's risky trolling for a relationship in the 90's, on either coast or in between. Who calls whom, and do beepers count? Do you flash that photocopy of your doctor's lab report after the cappuccino - or straightaway with the crawfish bisque? Few would deny the potential for big laughs in these mortifyingly PC times. And so it is that I have come to Los Angeles to investigate the pitfalls of being young, American and single, sitcom-style.

Just over the Hollywood Hills, in a valley honeycombed with television soundstages, a banquet of prime-time reality bites is being served up no less than ten "Gee, ain't it a bitch being single, career impaired and urban?" network comedies. Even in a jumpy TV season that has set a record for the amount of new programming, it is an unprecedented clone-athon. And it clearly sprang from the success of Seinfeld, Ellen, and last season's runaway hit, Friends.
Many of these young-and -unattatched series field Seinfeld-like ensemble casts. Six are set in Manhattan, otherwise known as the deepest ring of Singles Hell, where 61 percent of the population over 25 is unmarried. Frantic set designers have been airlifting authentic Greek-coffee-shop takeout cups and copies of the New York Post. (In an eerie moment on the Friends set, I am destined to find a takeout menu for a Burmese joint I frequent on Amsterdam and 76th tacked to the wall of Chandler and Joey's apartment.)

Right now there is no mightier comedy engine than NBC's singles Thursday, a two-hour arc of bad dates and great hair. As it happens (though no one at NBC will say it was intentional), all of those shows- Friends, The Single Guy, Seinfeld and Caroline in the City- are set in Manhattan and shot in L.A. And here shambling toward a busy Sunset Java junction, is the NBC poster boy for "Sweet, Smart, but Can't Catch a Break With the Babes."
From a block away, I recognize David Schwimmer - Ross on Friends - by his walk. It's Ross's lope - big, work-booted feet anchoring the long, lean body; shoulders warily hunched, as though a potted geranium or a suicidal unwed tax attorney might come hurtling down on his unsuspecting noggin.
In the unsparing new world of what the TV development folks call "sophisticated adult comedy," Ross has taken some hard knocks. He's a museum paleontologist whose pregnant wife divorced him for her lesbian partner. He's a baby-smitten new dad who has to listen to his son's gleeful "other mommy" describe the taste of the birth mommy's breast milk ("kinda like cantaloupe juice"). The capuchin monkey Ross adopted to counter his loneliness had to be sent to a zoo, owing to an unseemly testosterone surge (in truth the actors hated Marcel's cute, gibbering guts). As if that weren't enough, Ross is afflicted with an unrequited case of the hots for his sister's friend and current apartment-mate, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) - a condition that has persisted since his Clearasil days.

As 29-year-old Schwimmer plays him, Ross Geller is angsty, vulnerable and as cute as a wet retriever pup. Much of female America - especially those coveted 18- to 49-year-old free-spending, urban or fashionably suburban demographic dream gals - is ready to step up with a fluffy towel, a smooch and a soothing double latte. Schwimmer and his five fellow Friends have been besieged by all sorts of Gen X solidarity since the show took off last season and went on to dominate the 1995 Nielson top four with ER, Seinfeld, and Caroline in the City. The show's premise may not be new, but Friends possessed a young, very attractive cast, and a privileged infancy: a coveted time slot in the wake of that comic Kohoutek Seinfeld, and the wry, tight direction of sitcom swami James Burrows.

The essentials - writing, talent and target demographic - all came up cherries, gushing forth huge T-shirt sales, a maddeningly perky theme-song video on MTV, a brisky selling CD of Gen-X Friendly music (Toad the Wet Sprocket, R.E.M.) and at least a dozen hyperactive Friends Web sites (trivia contests, info lines, chat rooms, drinking games). "For a while there," gumps cast member Matthew Perry, who plays Chandler, "I thought we were becoming the Monkees."
In Fact, despite a slight ratings dip during New Year - most likely due to the onset of reruns - the merchandise has only escalated. Coca-Cola is staking $30 million on aFriends- centered campaign designed to win back young, calorie conscious types who have switched from diet Coke to other drinks. Deployment began on the first part of the year in college bookstores, on the Internet and on TV spots shot not by an ad agency but by the serie's own production team.
Friends, an authorized compendium of plot synopses, quizzes and sound bites by David Wild, hit the stores last December, just in time to stuff countless Nielson family stockings, rocketing to number two on The New York Times best-seller list. Should you still feel a bit peckish after devouring Wild's wiseass memoir by Marcel the Monkey, you can whip up Chandler's "Could This BE anymore fattening?" Cheesecake from Cooking With Friends, the authorized cookbook. For deep esoterica ("How does Monica guesstimate the size of men's penises?"), you'll have to ante up for Jae-Ha Kim's unauthorized Best of Friends. (If you must know, it's the distance from the tip of a guys thumb to the tip of his index finger.)

Could things GET anymore totally twirly? The show's perky ubiquity may be the reason I heard a clutch of Manhattan teens engage in a communal dis of a Friends window display of clothing. But dorky Friends boxer shorts aside, it's easy to see how it came to this. Despite the torrent of miserable, Prozac-infused novels, and tedious Net chat rooms devoted to actual or invented Gen X-ness, not much had made it to the networks. The only 25-year-olds living in prime time were the venal hunks 'n' tarts of Melrose Place. Somewhere between the box-office dissapointments of Singles and Reality Bites and the gross authenticity of Puck's nose-picking problems on MTV's The Real World, young America needed credible, accessible Friends.

It didn't hurt that they hug a lot and work out. For if perpetually single Jerry and Elaine and Kramer are already fixed in a vat of almost-40 amber, if they play a bit cool and brittle in their settled neuroses, the Friends gang radiates the warm glow of possibility. Ovaries are still sprightly, resumes still crisp.

Not to say that these three men and three women are coffee overachievers. (CBS is trying that with Almost Perfect, where the sexual tension between a hyper TV producer and L.A. district attorney is controlled - predictably - by dueling beepers.) Or underachievers (as in ABC's The Drew Carey Show, whose aging burb 'n' brewski single slackers have all the sex appeal of sticky tavern linoleum). The friends are believable cusp careerists, just beginning or still undecided. Their expectations aren't huge. Like the rest of young Americans who were potty-trained during Watergate, they got the word on adult life early on: Expect it to suck.

And so that in several cities, Friends enthusiasts have stopped Matt Perry and gotten very seriously in his face: "I hope you know what you're doing and how important it is. You're the voice of us in our twenties. DON'T MESS IT UP! And don't take it lightly." Perry, a small-screen master of deadpan zingers, says this passion has rendered him speechless more than once. ("OH, MY GOD! I thought I was just going to sign an autograph, and all of a sudden we have this huge job ahead of us.")
Understandably, no one on the show is comfortable harping on this Gen X thing. But Schwimmer can muster some credible Zeit-sight beyond the obvious appeal of the cast and the writing: "I think for some people it's a fantasy to have this close a group of people , to have a family, really of-well, I guess it's an attractive group. They're certainly loyal, fun and, in a way, cool. But I think that so many people have grown up products of divorce or not ideal family situations. And to have this kind of solid support group is something I think everyone wants in their lives."

Does he think he might explain the kind of weird role-playing that takes place on one of the very active FriendsWeb sites? ("So, I'm Rachel, and I've just met a really cute guy spraying Joop! at Bloomingdale's.") Schwimmer winces. "Eeesh. I'm not sure I want to know about all that."
As he pays for a giant container of black caffeine and a softball-sized chocolate muffin, the coffee bar begins to fill with potential bonding partners. Schwimmer suggests a walk.
"Um, maybe we can find a park bench and sit and talk."
"On Sunset?" I squeak. The man may have been born in Queens, New York, but he grew up here. Went to Beverly Hills High School. And somehow he doesn't know that in West Hollywood you'd stand a better chance of finding a fifty-foot rendering of Jon Bon Jovi's tush than four feet of wrought-iron pedestrian comfort. This Rossian cluelessness sets us wandering amid dim sum parlors and Milanese bondage wear shops. After a few benchless blocks, we climb a steep side street and settle on a brick wall bordering a lawn. Now and then, our conversation is interrupted by someone leaving creepy heavy-breathing messages on a nearby answering machine left on full volume.
"Uhhhahhhh. Unhhh. You there? Oh yes, ahhhhh..."

Knowing that Schwimmer has just bought a house in these loopy hills, I'm seized by one of those Care Bear moments; "You sure you'll be OK up here?"

He shrugs, then tries to explain some of his Tinseltown naiveté: My parents were attorneys and New Yorkers." Very moral, very loving, very strict. He and his sister weren't even allowed to watch TV, except on Saturday nights, "when the best you could hope for was a double episode of The Love Boat." Yes, his mother handled Roseanne's first divorce. And, sure, there were showbiz kids in his classes, but he was "never into the whole Hollywood-glamour thing."

He left for Chicago and Northwestern University when he was 17, fell in thrall to the stage and cofounded the Lokkingglass Theatre Company, with which he is still heavily involved. He returned to L.A. after graduation, lasted six months, then hightailed it back to his ad hoc family: fifteen hungry idealists putting on plays - and hanging out. "As I'm sure you've heard, life out here as a struggling actor, waiting tables, is souls sucking," he says. "So the theater company really kept my head straight."
In between plays, he tried TV: some small parts on L.A. Law, a recurring role as a vigilante on NYPD Blue. And like all his costars who appeared in bombs (Vinnie & Bobby, Muddling Through, The Trouble With Larry), Schwimmer faced death by laugh track, most recently in the ill-fated 1994 Henry Winkler comeback vehicle, Monty. That experience made him swear off sitcoms forever. "I didn't feel like I was funny," he says, "and that's the worst feeling in the world."

He rescinded that ban when he read a startlingly good script written by the production team of David Crane, Marta Kauffman and Kevin Bright, the creators of Dream On and the executive producers of Friends. They remembered Schwimmer from a past audition and wrote Ross for the hangdog neurotic voice they couldn't get out of their heads. Schwimmer was the only cast member offered his part without an audition.

Since then it's been raining opportunity: an AT&T commercial, a spot hosting Saturday Night Live, a starring role in The Pallbearer, a black comedy that opens in April, and a two-picture deal with Miramax. All this averaging a few antic minutes of airtime per week before 28 million Americans.

"I don't think I'm any better an actor than I was five years ago," Schwimmer says. "Now I'm just a better financial risk. I have the higher Q rating." Thus it makes sense that in the season's seventh episode, Ross- who became happily involved with a pretty paleontologist named Julie - finds out that Rachel really likes him, too. That way. After all that hangdog mooning, after about 10,000 fan queries - You guys ever gonna get together? - Ross and Rachel will begin. Maybe. "You're here on a great week," Schwimmer tells me, "because we have this ...this kiss. It's really big for us."
Like when Sam finally boinked Diane?

I hope so. I think we've got a lot of viewer investment ."

The Kiss, Phase One: Stage 24, Warner Bros. Studios, in Burbank. Rachel and Ross have just found out they "have feelings" for each other, and they fight cute about their bad timing as Rachel closes Central Perk for the night. Ross storms off; she flings herself on the couch. He reappears; they meet in the middle of the room; they reach. At last: a kiss. Silence, until guest director Peter Bonerz - you know him as Jerry the Orthodontist from The Bob Newhart Show - calls for a huddle: "We're changing our LIVES here, people. Let's WORK it."

It's a calculated risk, tampering with sexual tensions on a starship that's just spun off a new line of Central Perk dorm wear. Long before the Kiss episode will air during the November sweeps, bad chemistry - real or imagined - undermines some other singles shows. CBS sees Can't Hurry Love (more hapless relationship hunters in Manhattan) continue to slip against that cartoony singles soap Melrose Place. And CBS pulls the plug on If Not For You (dating dilemmas in Minneapolis) after just four episodes.

Just weeks into this musky mate-athon, The New York Times reports the first backlash: With eight o'clock sitcoms blaring about "Frosty the Sperm Man" and "nipular areas," more families are leaving the networks for child-friendly cable fare such as Nick at Nite. The lubricious Singles Season's first three weeks cede cable networks a 24 percent gain over the same time last year. Some big advertisers are alienated - and once again, programmers begin to sweat.

Continued...Part 2 (click here)

Return To Articles Page