The first episode of Friends had everyone feeling for Monica (Courteney Cox) after her one-night stand went awry — everyone, that is, except a certain NBC executive, according to co-creator David Crane.
In that pilot installment, Monica goes on a dinner date with Paul (John Allen Nelson), a.k.a. “Paul the Wine Guy,” who tells her he hasn’t been able to perform — “sexually,” he adds, making Monica do a spit take — ever since his wife walked out on him. Monica ends up sleeping with Paul and only later learns that his story was all a ruse.
In a new Friends retrospective for The Sunday Times, Crane says that a network boss tried vetoing that plot and that NBC even surveyed audience members in an effort to prove that point.
“The guy who was in charge [an NBC executive] said: ‘We’re not going to like Monica because [in the pilot] she sleeps with a guy on the first date,’” Crane says. “We made the argument that it makes her sympathetic. The network, in trying to prove that the audience wouldn’t like Monica if she sleeps with a guy on the first date, distributed a little questionnaire to the audience at our dress rehearsal. And it was so skewed. The question was like: ‘When Monica sleeps with a guy on her first date, is she a) a slut or b) a harlot?’ And people wrote in saying: ‘No, it’s fine.’”
An NBC research report published by The Smoking Gun in 2004 corroborates Crane’s recollection. Though the report called the Friends pilot “weak” and said test audiences “felt the show was not very entertaining, clever, or original,” Monica’s subplot “earned sympathy mostly from women who felt sorry for her after she was conned by Paul.”
Paul, meanwhile, “did not score [well] with viewers,” the report added, though some “described him as good-looking and believable and commented that he added a ‘punch’ of reality because ‘there are definitely guys like him.’”
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