Friends co-creator Marta Kauffman is making amends.
For years, the showrunner dismissed critics who said the NBC series wasn’t diverse enough, but now, she sees they were right. Kauffman said, “Admitting guilt and accepting it is difficult” The Los Angeles Times June 29. It’s hard to look in the mirror. “I’m ashamed that I didn’t realize better 25 years back.”
In the past, Kauffman felt like the series, which ran from 1994 to 2004, was being called out for no reason, saying that it was “difficult and frustrating” to understand why people were so critical.
In recent years, she has come to appreciate the importance of screen representation. It was only after the events of George FloydKauffman said that it was then that Kauffman began to confront the fact of my involvement in systemic racism in ways that were not obvious to me. That was the point when I started to look at the things I’d done. “I knew that I had to make a course correction.”