NBC Executive Denied Monica Had Sex On First Date

While Friends considered progressive for its time, the classic ’90s sitcom faced its fair share of network pushback. Co-creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman recalled that they once stood up to an NBC executive who wanted to change the pilot’s plot for Monica Geller (Courteney Cox), which showed her sleeping with someone on the first date.

“The young man in charge said: ‘We will not like Monica because [in the pilot] she sleeps with a guy on the first day.’ We’ve made the argument that it makes him sympathetic,” Crane told the UK newspaper The Times in an article detailing what’s going on with the series.

In “The Pilot,” chef Monica sleeps with her co-worker nicknamed “Paul the wine guy” on the first day after she confides in him that she hasn’t slept with anyone since they broke up two years ago. As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that he lied to get her into bed.

“The network, in an attempt to prove that the audience won’t like Monica if she sleeps with a guy on the first date, distributed a little questionnaire to the audience during our dressing room,” Crane said. “And it was very lopsided. The question was like: ‘When Monica sleeps with a guy on her first date, is he a whore or b) a whore?’”

However, the audience chose a third, unlisted, none of the above. “People wrote and said: ‘No, it’s fine’,” Crane said.

In the same interview, Kauffman talked about another scene where the audience helped shape the sitcom’s platform — that of Monica’s relationship with Chandler (Matthew Perry).

“We thought it was going to be a one-night stand,” Kauffman explained. “But they got such a strong response from the London audience that it changed where we were going with the story.”