The Making of the Best-Ever Episode of ‘Friends’
‘The One with the Embryos’ serves as a template for all that Friends did best
In 2009, when TV Guide named the 100 greatest television episodes of all time, it settled on a single Friends episode to inhabit the 21st slot: “The One with the Embryos,” from the show’s fourth season. Fanatics might differ about which Friends episode reigns as the series’ all-time best — others might vouch for “The One with the Prom Video” or “The One with All the Poker” — but in its belly laughs and its bursts of emotion, in its skillful intermingling of divergent plotlines, and in its surprise denouement, “The One with the Embryos” serves as a template for all that Friends did best.
Producing a television show sometimes required adjusting to real-world circumstances. Friends’ characters were played by actors who lived lives off the set that had to be accommodated, hidden, or transformed. When it came to the fourth season of Friends, the tricky encumbrance that the show’s writers had to somehow wrestle with was that Lisa Kudrow was pregnant. Some shows had attempted to cover up their star’s real-life pregnancy with loose clothing and a sudden interest in carrying around bowling balls and dictionaries (as Friends itself would do, after a fashion, with Courteney Cox in its tenth season). Others chose to make…
