Posted in: Max, NBC, TV | Tagged: conan o'brien, conan o'brien needs a friend, friends, lisa kudrow, nbc

Friends Star Lisa Kudrow on Live Audiences Being Blessing and Curse

Friends star Lisa Kudrow on being annoyed by live studio audiences badly impacting filming and writing changes that dragged out filming days.

Live studio audiences used to be a sitcom staple, but not as much anymore, especially when producers can cheat the home audience with laugh tracks or bypass having audience reaction altogether. For others like Lisa Kudrow, who played Phoebe Buffay in all 10 seasons of Friends from 1994-2004, it also affected the production as a whole during filming. Appearing on Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast, the Emmy-winner and five-time nominee from the series spoke out about how things like prolonged laughter from the audience on jokes she didn't find as funny became a pet peeve on the NBC series.

Friends Star Lisa Kudrow Reflects on Her Live-Audience Pet Peeve

"Because they were laughing for too long. It wasn't that funny. That's why," the Time Bandits star told the former late-night host on her annoyance with the Friends studio audiences. "It wasn't an honest response, and it irritated me. Now, you're just ruining the timing of the rest of the show. There are other lines. Sometimes I would just look out if they'd been laughing too long, and go, 'Come on'. Really angry."

Kudrow explained her disdain has nothing to do with their presence but more with how sitcoms are structured and the awkwardness of changing the pace before the scene can continue. "A TV show is not for the studio audience," she continued. "It is made for the TV viewers at home. That's who we are in service to. If it was a stage play, yeah, laugh as long as you want. I'll figure out things to keep my character busy, waiting to continue with it. That's fine. It's being filmed, and now I'm just standing there … you do like nod, 'Yeah, I said that.' It's terrible. They instructed our audience not to do anything like that, I think."

It wasn't just a matter of perfectionism as Kudrow noted Friends often spent six to eight hours filming one half-hour episode, tying up production with "so many takes" that the audience would eventually "stop laughing." The writers then reacted, thinking the material no longer worked and forced rewrites and more takes. "But it worked the first time!" she said. "All I knew is you're going to take the laugh track from the first take and move it to whatever take this is. Who is suffering because they're not laughing? I am okay if they aren't laughing as hard. We can keep going." Created by David Crane and Marta Kauffman, Friends also starred Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LaBlanc, and the late Matthew Perry and is available to stream on Max. Time Bandits streams two episodes every Wednesday on AppleTV+. For more with Kudrow reflecting more with O'Brien about Friends, you can check out the video.

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