20 Mind-Blowing Facts You Never Knew About Friends
6. It Almost Finished Halfway Through
By banding together and presenting a united front, the cast of Friends would see their salaries rise to $75,000 per episode for Season 3. Their paymasters recognised just how crucial the actors chemistry was to the show's success and acquiesced to early demands for substantial pay increases, but negotiations hit an impasse ahead of Season 5.
It became public knowledge that the cast was demanding $100,000 each per episode when the press started reporting on the contract wrangles, and Harold Brook, who was executive vice president of business affairs at the time, has described how close the show came to ending then and there:
The night before we were going to announce the schedule, I was in the bathroom at a restaurant and got a call from Warner Bros. It's starting, they said. The negotiation started around 10 p.m. and closed around 3 a.m. We had two promos made - one was the season finale, and one was the series finale.
Ultimately, the actors demands were met, and the final two seasons of Friends would see their salaries rise to a whopping million dollars per episode.