A Friends game show is being made to celebrate the long-running comedy’s 30th anniversary.
Titled Fast Friends, the four-part HBO Max show will be filmed inside The Friends Experience: The One in New York, a two-story, 17,000 square-foot attraction featuring various recreated sets from the hit show. Production begins next month, but a transmission date has not yet been confirmed.
“From racing through Rachel and Monica’s apartment to darting across Joey and Chandler’s bachelor pad and grabbing a coffee at Central Perk, fans will relive their favorite moments while being put to the test with trivia, puzzles and games that will keep even the most die-hard Friends fans on their toes,” according to a press release. The teams will compete to be crowned the ultimate Friends fans.
The pilot episode of Friends aired 30 years ago yesterday (September 22). It ran for 10 seasons, ending in May 2004.
Recently, while reflecting on the milestone anniversary, Courteney Cox said she “can’t imagine” that a reboot of the show would work.
“It’s hard to try to redo anything,” she told People. “Anything with ‘re’ in front of it with this group…I think it’s so special.”
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She has, however, shared her love for the show and its legacy, describing it as “incredible”, and saying, “Every joke holds up, all the characters are just so amazing, and we [had] the best writers in the world. I’m lucky that it continues on through all the generations. And that’s very fortunate.”
Elsewhere, the fallout from the tragic death of Matthew Perry in October 2023 continues to be felt, with five people having been charged last month, including ‘Ketamine Queen’ Jasveen Sangha and Perry’s personal assistant Kenneth Iwamasa.
Hollywood addiction expert Joe Schrank recently said that Perry had surrounded himself with a “toxic” group of “enablers”, explaining: “It was toxic. But that’s what they do. Addicts like Perry are going to surround themselves with enablers – assistants who will not draw lines in the sand, sycophantic hangers-on who’ll do anything to be near a celebrity, including get them drugs – and distance themselves from people that will tell them hard truths.”
Perry’s co-star David Schwimmer revealed last week that he was surprised to learn that Perry had been complimentary about him, after he had been “reserved” with him so often in the past.
In other Friends news, one of the writers of the show, Andrew Reich, has said he would “bring more diversity” to the show now if he had the opportunity. On the same theme, Aisha Tyler, who played paleontologist Charlie Wheeler in the ninth and tenth seasons of the show, has also reflected on the lack of diversity on the show.