Lisa Kudrow Makes It Clear How She Feels About Friends' Diversity Issue

The mega-popular sitcom "Friends" was a huge cultural phenomenon that, thanks to reruns and streaming availability on HBO Max, continues to be enjoyed nearly 20 years after the show aired its final episode in 2004. However, the passage of time is a strange thing, and in recent years, there have been more and more conversations about the lack of diversity on the series, which follows the lives of six friends living in New York City, all of whom happen to be white. It's one of the questionable things in "Friends" that some fans overlook. 

The issue of the lack of diversity among the core cast became such a hot topic that in June 2022, co-creator Marta Kauffman told The Los Angeles Times, "I'm embarrassed that I didn't know better 25 years ago." In addition to addressing the issue head-on, Kauffman pledged $4 million to Brandeis University's African and African American studies program. Kauffman isn't the only member of the "Friends" family to talk about the diversity issues related to the show. Recently, "Friends" star Lisa Kudrow made her own feelings on the subject perfectly clear.

During a recent interview with The Daily Beast, Lisa Kudrow addressed the diversity controversy that has surrounded "Friends" for years now, and she offered an interesting take. In Kudrow's opinion, telling the stories of people of color wasn't something that the two white creators of "Friends" should have been doing. Elaborating on this point, Kudrow said, "Well, 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. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color."

Kudrow ultimately believes that the real issue that "Friends" faced was a lack of apprenticeship. In this context, Kudrow seems to imply that the production should have been bringing in more diverse voices for the writers' room or fostering new, young writers of color to tell their own stories. This isn't exactly something Kauffman herself appears to disagree with, either. In the aforementioned Los Angeles Times interview, Kauffman not only committed to her money pledge, but also vowed to bring in more diverse talent for her future projects. 

So, while Kudrow definitely shares different views about the subject, it's clear she does agree that there were ways "Friends" could have done things better.