The idea of creating the series

HOW THE ACTORS HAD THE IDEA OF CREATING THE SERIES

David Crane and Marta Kauffman started developing three new pilots to television that would premiere in the second semester of 1994, after having their sitcom Family Album canceled by CBS in 1993. Crane and Kauffman decided to present the series about “six people with theirs 20 years finding their way in Manhattan” to NBC, because they thought it would be suitable to this channel. They presented the idea to their production partner Kevin Bright, who worked as executive producer in the series of the HBO Dream On. The idea to the series came up when Crane and Kauffman started remembering of the moment they had finished college and started living by their own, in New York. Kauffman believed that they were looking for the moment that the future was “a large question mark”. They thought this was an interesting concept, because they believed that “everybody knows how this feeling is”, and because, they felt that about their own lives at that moment. The team of producers entitled the series as Insomnia Café and launched the idea in a project of seven pages to the NBC, in December 1993.         

At the same time, Warren Littlefield, who was the actual president of the NBC Entertainment, was looking for a comedy involving young people that lived together and shared their expenses. Littlefield wanted the group to share the memorable periods of their lives with their friends, becoming new member of a substitute family. However, Littlefield found difficulties in bringing the concept to reality and found terrible scripts developed by NBC. When Bright, Crane and Kauffman presented Insomnia Cafe, Littlefield got impressed how they knew who were theirs characters. The NBC bought the idea of developing a pilot, so, Crane and Kauffman started writing a pilot script for a sitcom, which, at the moment, was entitled Friends Like Us and took three days to be written. Littlefield wanted the series to represent the Generation X, but the creators did not agree with his vision. Crane argued that it was not a series to a specific generation, but he wanted to produce a series that everybody would like to watch.   

As a result, the NBC liked the script of the episode, but, ordered the change of the title to Six of One, because the other title was similar to a sitcom from NBC, called “These Friends of Mine.