Lisa Kudrow has sounded off on the ongoing Friends diversity debate, saying the creators didn’t have any business writing about people of color.
The Daily Beast reports that Kudrow, who starred in the ’90s series, said that the series was about creator Marta Kauffman’s experiences at college as a post-grad. Reading between the lines, it can be assumed that Kauffman’s experiences primarily included non-white classmates.
"I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college. And for shows especially, when it's going to be a comedy that's character-driven, you write what you know," said Kudrow.
“They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color,” she added. “I think at that time, the big problem that I was seeing was, ‘Where’s the apprenticeship?'”
It’s not clear on what Kudrow meant by “apprenticeship,” but perhaps it means mentoring other non-white creators, something Kauffman has said she is ready to do via the creation of a $4 million fund supporting students studying Africa and the African diaspora.
This isn't the first time Kudrow has spoken out about Friends, which had been under fire for several years as an assumed copy of 'Living Single,' the all-Black sitcom that came out prior to Friends.
“Well, it would not be an all-white cast, for sure. I’m not sure what else, but, to me, it should be looked at as a time capsule, not for what they did wrong,” she said at the time. “Also, this show thought it was very progressive. There was a guy whose wife discovered she was gay and pregnant and they raised a child together? We had surrogacy too. It was, at the time, progressive.”
