Friends - Series Finale

Series Finale

The series' creators completed the first draft of the hour-long finale in January 2004, four months before its original airing. Crane, Kauffman and Bright watched the finales of other sitcoms to prepare the episode's outline, paying attention to what worked and what did not. They liked the ones that stayed true to the series, citing the finale of The Mary Tyler Moore Show as the gold standard. Crane, Kauffman, and Bright had difficulty writing the finale, and spent several days thinking about the final scene without being able to write a word. They did not want to do "something high concept, or take the show out of the show". The most critical parts of the finale were shot without an audience, and with a minimum number of crew members. The main cast enjoyed the finale and were confident that the fans would react similarly:

It's exactly what I had hoped. We all end up with a sense of a new beginning and the audience has a sense that it's a new chapter in the lives of all these characters. —David Schwimmer on the series finale.

NBC heavily promoted the series finale, which was preceded by weeks of media hype. Local NBC affiliates organized viewing parties around the U.S., including an event at Universal CityWalk featuring a special broadcast of the finale on an outdoor Astrovision screen. The finale was the subject of two episodes of Dateline NBC, a weekly television newsmagazine, one of which ran for two hours. A one-hour retrospective of clips from previous episodes was shown before to the airing of the episode. Following the finale, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was filmed on the set of the Friends' Central Perk coffee house, which featured the series' cast as guests. The advertising rates for the finale averaged $2 million for 30 seconds of commercial time, breaking the record held by the Seinfeld finale at $1.7 million.

In the U.S., 52.5 million viewers watched the finale on May 6, 2004, making it the most watched entertainment telecast since the Seinfeld finale in 1998. Although it was not the series' most watched episode, the finale was the fourth most watched series finale in television history, only behind the finales of M*A*S*H, Cheers and Seinfeld, which were respectively watched by 105, 80.4 and 76.2 million viewers. The retrospective episode was watched by fewer than 36 million viewers, and the finale was the second most watched television episode of the year, only behind the Super Bowl. Following the finales of Friends and Frasier, media critics speculated about the fate of the sitcom genre. Expressed opinions varied between a signaling of the end of the sitcom genre, a small decline in the large history of the genre, and a general reduction of scripted television in favor of reality shows.