Louise Bernard with Laura Laplaud
In an interview with the “Los Angeles Times”, Marta Kauffman, the co-creator of the American sitcom “Friends” makes her mea culpa on the lack of diversity in the cast. She sends a check for 4 million dollars to a university in Massachusetts to create a chair in the department of African and Afro-American studies.
Not enough diversity within one of the most popular series? Series co-creator Friends, Marta Kauffman, makes her mea culpa regarding the lack of casting diversity with a nice check for 4 million dollars she sends to a university in Massachusetts. The objective: to create a chair within the department of African and Afro-American studies.
The series regularly criticized on the subject
A chair for “the study of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora”, she specifies. Because the co-creator of Friends said to herself “embarrassed not to have done better” and said to feel “such guilt”.
The American sitcom has been regularly criticized in recent years for the lack of diversity on the screen: the heroes are all white and the rare characters from diversity can be counted on the fingers of one hand when there are, in total , 236 episodes of 22 minutes, broadcast between 1994 and 2004.
Marta Kauffman told the Los Angeles Times having recently realized that these criticisms were true. She says she had the trigger for the death of Georges Floyd, an African-American, who died during his arrest by the police on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis. A death that made her reflect on systemic racism and the fact that she had participated in it in some way. She says she wants to “correct [sa] path”.