David Schwimmer must have thought he was doing the culture a favor with his recommendation of someone creating a "black version" of Friends. BUT that attempt backfired on him.
The actor opened up to The Guardian about being part of the legendary TV sitcom and the impact that it's left to this day. While it was wildly successful, "Ross" admitted he wished there was more diversity in the show. So much so, he told the publication how he's advocated for casting more characters of color while he was on.
“But I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of colour. One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part."
All that sounded well and good until he led into wishing someone would create an "all-black" version of the hit show. While he's "very aware of my privilege as a heterosexual white male," he was clueless to the insult he made to the one particular show that came before his. Erika Alexander made it clear that she wasn't feeling the comment since her character, "Maxine" was a major player in Living Single, the show that served as the very inspiration for Friends.
This morning's Rumor Report played a snippet of Erika's visit to the show where she divulged the unknown industry fun fact, where she even said the successful African-American themed show was actually originally supposed to be called "Friends."
"One of the executives had a whole list of names. Three or four or five of them and he read them out. 'Living Single, Friends,' blah, blah, blah and they chose 'Living Single' for us and then the next year they created 'Friends.' The same people with Warner Bros. We were on the ranch lot. They were on the big lot. We called the ranch lot the ghetto lot. We had nothing on that lot...At the end of our run we were being paid a lot less and people said, 'Well you had a smaller market share.' I said, 'Compared to what?'"
Queen Latifah has even echoed the same story on Watch What Happens Live.
"It was one of those things where it was a guy called Warren Littlefield that used to run NBC, and they asked him when all the new shows came out, they said, 'If there's any show you could have, which one would it be?' And he said, 'Living Single.' And then he created 'Friends,' "
David's comment went viral among Twitter to the point where Living Single was a trending topic. The 54-year-old obviously caught wind of the storm he created and issued a statement to drench the fire.