Friends Season 7 Episode 6

[Galeno Kent]

Theseries narrative follows six friends living and working in New York City: Rachel Green, Monica Geller, Phoebe Buffay, Joey Tribbiani, Chandler Bing, and Ross Geller played by Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer respectively. All episodes were filmed at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank in front of a live studio audience, except the fourth season finale, "The One with Ross's Wedding", that was filmed on location in London in front of a British studio audience.[1]

The rest of the season began airing starting on May 12, 2024, with episodes being added to Max the day after their Adult Swim premieres. The season is scheduled to conclude on June 23, 2024 with "Pim Finally Turns Green".

"Delve into the world of Smiling Friends, where Pim, Charlie, Zongo, Allan and Glep fight off evildoers and nasty baddies and maybe some characters smile on the way as well! After all, it IS their job!!! This SHALL be an epic season and you SHALL enjoy it!" [4]

The first thing that you\u2019ll notice about Smiling Friends, the Adult Swim favorite that recently kicked off its second season, is its inspired mishmash of art styles. On one end of the spectrum are simple, pastel-colored critters: excitable Pim (Michael Cusack) is small, pink, and circular, while laid-back Charlie (Zach Hadel) has a banana-like head protruding from an orange hoodie. On the other end is their boss, Mr. Boss (Marc M.), a hyper-detailed human with a bulbous noggin that makes him look like a cross between Pops from Regular Show and The Man from Another Place in Twin Peaks. Hadel and Cusack, who are also the creators of Smiling Friends, only dial up the contrast from there. The show\u2019s breakout first season employed stop-motion and rotoscope, and the new episodes hardly miss a step, dabbling in 32-bit polygons and, for its second episode, a fully live-action President (Mike Bocchetti) who Pim and Charlie have been hired to cheer up.\u00a0

That\u2019s ostensibly the premise of every episode, with the characters emerging from their smiley-faced headquarters to assist some strange new character. But it\u2019s more of a jumping-off point than an ironclad structure; the second season\u2019s third episode instead follows Pim and Charlie\u2019s red, necktie-wearing co-worker Allan (also voiced by Cusack) in his attempts to find paper clips for the office. There is no overarching plot here, and there\u2019s only light continuity in a few recurring characters like malevolent TV star Mr. Frog (Cusack again). For as much as Rick and Morty is the current poster child for Adult Swim success, Smiling Friends is a throwback to anarchic, non sequitur-laden Adult Swim classics like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as filtered through the Flash animation heyday of Newgrounds (where Hadel and Cusack honed their craft).

Each 11-minute episode plays like a sort of magic trick: A detail established in the opening minutes inevitably figures into the conclusion, but there are so many bizarre tangents in between that you totally forget what that detail was before it\u2019s called back. Yet at the same time, there\u2019s a skewed logic behind Smiling Friends\u2019 riotous, rapid-fire surrealism. The Season 2 premiere follows a washed-up video game mascot named Gwimbly (Hadel). As a platform star of the 1990s, he\u2019s naturally rendered in muddy polygons that flicker up-close, and he speaks in a tinny, low-quality voice compared to the other characters \u2013 to the point that you can hear the mic peak when he yells. When we briefly glimpse Gwimbly in his prime on a CRT monitor, the bright colors and character design recall the PS1 reign of Spyro the Dragon.

Such levels of detail, specificity, and overall experimentation are what takes Smiling Friends to such delightful heights. We see the mundane, often depressing reality at work in what\u2019s otherwise a colorful cartoon landscape: Gwimbly makes his living on Cameo, mumbling awkwardly through a commission while holding his phone at a low angle and using a filter to make himself look less blocky. At the same time, the Smiling Friends universe never feels boxed in by logic: Allan\u2019s quest for paper clips comes to involve a helicopter and a skeleton pirate, and nearly every scene of a malevolent gaming CEO in the premiere inexplicably depicts him fiddling with chicken nuggets and dipping sauce.

The series is particularly refreshing in the space of adult animation, where the medium often feels secondary, if not outright perfunctory. Not every one of these experiments is a success in the new season: the comedic potential of the\u00a0 gross-out, live-action president is somewhat misjudged. But even at its weakest, Smiling Friend radiates glee at the possibilities of its format. There is violence and ugliness in its world, but it\u2019s hard not to smile while watching it all go down.

When the cast won their $1 million/episode salaries (or $22 million per season), the show had just recovered from seasons of declining ratings and was enjoying its highest-rated season in five years. But the stars really wanted to do other things, which meant the show was close to ending. It would end up running just two more seasons, but no one at the time knew exactly. And if NBC felt it could get at least one more year of "Friends," it would take that. The network needed all the time it could get. None of the shows NBC produced in eight years showed the ability to replace "Friends."

To make the timing even more critical, salary negotiations were still open as the show had just four scripts left in the season. The writers had to know if they needed to write a proper series ending.

It was also getting terribly close to network upfronts, which are annual presentations of the season's upcoming schedule to potential advertisers. If NBC didn't have "Friends" on its schedule, it would've been disastrous for advertising sales.

According to accounts of the events, the "Friends" cast didn't just decide to band together for a million dollars in 2002. They had been negotiating their salaries together since the show's third season. But that required two of the stars to take initial pay cuts.

As the central couple of the show, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston made more money than the others. After the hit first season, Schwimmer was being courted with movie offers and his agents felt it was time to renegotiate his "Friends" contract. But he had enough forethought to convince his costars to act as a mini-union and insist on being paid equally.

That may have cost Schwimmer and Aniston initially, but who knew how long they'd stay the most popular actors on the show. By negotiating as a group, they not only gained leverage, but some job security. The show could easily drop one actor, but how could they write around the loss of all of them?

On top of that, the "Friends" cast not only made $1 million an episode, but they also have had years of syndication payments (a bump they won during season-six negotiations). Can you imagine a time when "Friends" episodes weren't in reruns somewhere on TV since the 90s? Last year, USA Today reported that each of the stars receives $20 million a year in syndication payments.

Season 1Season 1, episodes 1-30Executive ProducersSheryl Leach

Dennis DeShazer

Kathy ParkerWritersStephen White

Mark S. BernthalDirectorsJim Rowley

Bruce DeckMusical DirectorsBob SingletonProduction LocationColorDynamics at Greenville Avenue & Bethany Drive in Allen, TexasProduction CompanyThe Lyons Group

Connecticut Public TelevisionOriginal DistributorThe Lyons GroupReleaseOriginal NetworkPBSSeason PremiereApril 6, 1992Season FinaleMay 15, 1992Season GuideNextSeason 2The first season of the American live-action educational children's television series, Barney & Friends, created by Sheryl Leach and co-created by Kathy Parker and Dennis DeShazer, was premiered on PBS from April 6 to May 15, 1992, and consisted of 30 episodes. Succeeding the home video series, Barney & The Backyard Gang, this season features Barney, with characters from the home video series such as Baby Bop, a diverse cast of kids, including Derek, Michael, Tina, and Luci, and introduces new kids - Min, Kathy, Shawn, and Tosha.

Based off its predecessor, this season displays Barney, who comes to life through a child's imagination, whenever he is needed for something, helping his friends through educational themes tailored for toddlers, which is the viewing audience. Unlike the home video series, that took place in various settings, the show takes place at a school classroom and playground, which is where the children characters attend during the day.

On Super Bowl Sunday in 1991, executive vice president of programming for Connecticut Public Television,[1] Larry Rifkin, rented the Barney video, A Day at the Beach, for his 4-year-old daughter Leora Rifkin,[2] which they got from Prospect Video Store, in Prospect, Connecticut.[3] Once they got home, his daughter couldn't stop watching the video. Rifkin tested the video on other children in the neighborhood to make sure the reaction wasn't unusual. Rifkin liked the concept, so he spoke with Leach and other creators about putting Barney on television. At the time, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting had been looking for something new, educational and lively to supplement the programs that were already on television.[4]

In June of 1991, it was announced that Barney would have a new show debuting on PBS with a scheduled release for April 1992 with thirty episodes.[5] A $2.25 million grant was given to The Lyons Group and Connecticut Public Television to produce the new show. One of the changes announced for the show was dropping the word "gang" due to it having negative connotations.[5] In October of that year, production began on the new television show, titled Barney & Friends and ended in-between March and April 1992.

A majority of the main cast members from Barney & The Backyard Gang returned to portray their characters in the successor series. Cast members such as Becky Swonke (Amy), Alexander Jhin (Adam), and Dao Knight (Baby Bop's costume performer) did not return. Becky Swonke left the series due to an illness, Alexander Jhin left the series due to moving out of the Texas area, and Sandy Duncan was invited to return to the franchise for Barney & Friends, but she declined.[6] Although this was Lauren King (Kathy)'s first season appearance as her respective character, Kathy had been introduced in Rock with Barney.

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