The first episode of Friends had everybody feeling for Monica (Courteney Cox) after her one-night stand went awry — everybody, that’s, besides a sure NBC government, in response to co-creator David Crane.
In that pilot installment, Monica goes on a dinner date with Paul (John Allen Nelson), a.okay.a. “Paul the Wine Guy,” who tells her he hasn’t been capable of carry out — “sexually,” he provides, making Monica do a spit take — ever since his spouse walked out on him. Monica finally ends up sleeping with Paul and solely later learns that his story was all a ruse.
In a brand new Friends retrospective for The Sunday Times, Crane says {that a} community boss tried vetoing that plot and that NBC even surveyed viewers members in an effort to show that time.
“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 analysis report printed by The Smoking Gun in 2004 corroborates Crane’s recollection. Though the report known as the Friends pilot “weak” and stated take a look at 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, in the meantime, “did not score [well] with viewers,” the report added, although some “described him as good-looking and believable and commented that he added a ‘punch’ of reality because ‘there are definitely guys like him.’”