‘The One After the Superbowl’ 30 Years Later: ‘Friends’ Most-Watched Episode Ever, Revisited

Thirty years ago, a group of Friends and a few movie stars lit up NBC after Super Bowl XXX, as nearly 53 million viewers tuned into “The One After the Superbowl” on January 28, 1996.

The double-length Friends episode saw Ross (David Schwimmer) reconnecting with former pet monkey Marcel on a film set, Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow) scandalizing her librarian boyfriend (played by Chris Isaak) with her inappropriate children’s songs, Joey (Matt LeBlanc) dating a fan (played by Brooke Shields) who mistakes fiction for reality, Chandler (Matthew Perry) getting his just deserts from an elementary-school classmate (played by Julia Roberts) he tormented, and Monica (Courteney Cox) and Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) vying for the affection of Jean-Claude Van Damme (played by himself).

And though no one’s saying “The One After the Superbowl” is classic Friends, the episode still holds the distinction of being the most-watched Super Bowl lead-out on record. But here’s what all those millions of viewers at home didn’t know…

1. NBC went with Friends because it didn’t want to debut a new series after the Super Bowl.

When it came time to schedule a lead-out for Super Bowl XXX, NBC went with a tried-and-true favorite instead of a freshman series like its sitcom The Good Life and the ABC drama Extreme, each of which only lasted 13 episodes despite getting post-Super Bowl airings in the two years prior.

“Try to think of the new shows that were premiered after recent Super Bowls, and name one that’s still around,” Curt King, a senior press manager for the show, told The Boston Globe at the time. “What we decided to do this year was not to unveil a new show but give people an extra-special version of a show they already like a lot.”

(King might have been forgetting about the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which debuted after Super Bowl XXVII three years prior, was still going strong at the time of Friends’ Super Bowl episode.)

2. Matthew Perry wrote a paper on quantum physics to get Julia Roberts to guest-star.

Friends executive producer Kevin Bright told The Hollywood Reporter Perry reached out to Roberts to ask her to appear on the show, and she gave him a challenge. “She wrote back to him, ‘Write me a paper on quantum physics, and I’ll do it,’” Bright said. “My understanding is that Matthew went away and wrote a paper and faxed it to her the next day.”

Added staff writer Alexa Junge, “There was a lot of flirting over faxing. She was giving him these questionnaires like, ‘Why should I go out with you?’ And everyone in the writers’ room helped him explain to her why.”

Perry wrote in his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing that he and Roberts ended up dating for two months before he ended the relationship out of insecurity.

3. Roberts was “so nervous” filming her role — more nervous than she’d been since her Pretty Woman days.

Roberts told the Gannett News Service in 1996 that her Friends guest spot was her most nerve-wracking experience since her Pretty Woman screen test.

“I was so nervous!” she exclaimed. “I think it comes out of this 7-year-old desire to get the tail right on the donkey’s ass, and you have no idea how to do it. I wanted to be the best I could be. [Perry is] incredibly funny, and you want to inspire that same kind of joy that he does. Then at a certain point at lunch, you go, ‘Well, it ain’t gonna happen. I’ll just try to be cute.’”

4. Brooke Shields got her own sitcom out of her guest-starring role.

Warren Littlefield, then-president of NBC Entertainment, was so bowled over by Shields’ performance in “The One After the Superbowl” that he gave her a sitcom.

“I was watching the rough cut in my office and saying, ‘Holy s***, Brooke Shields is without fear.’ And I called [Friends creators] Marta [Kauffman] and David [Crane] and asked, ‘Is Brooke Shields as good as she seems?’ They said they had a blast with her. So I reached out to her representation and said I wanted to do a comedy with her. That turned into [the 1996-2000 sitcom] Suddenly Susan.”

5. Andre Agassi was reportedly jealous of Shields’ scenes with Matt LeBlanc.

At the time of the filming, Shields was in a relationship with tennis champion Andre Agassi, and Michael Lembeck, who directed both parts of “The One After the Superbowl” told THR Agassi had a fit of jealousy after Shields’ restaurant scene with LeBlanc.

“She does the scene where she starts licking Matt’s hand. Then I see him come down, pull Brooke aside, and eviscerate her because he’s crazy-jealous,” Lemback recalled. “She’s reduced to tears! I broke the show for a while, and the girls took Brooke aside and loved her, took care of her, and got her back on that stage. She did great because of the support of those three. He was a jackass.”

Shields and Agassi married in 1997 and divorced in 1999.

6. Writers tested Jean-Claude Van Damme’s lines in a French accent.

It was “quite a challenge” finding funny lines for Van Damme, an unnamed Friends writer recalled in the book The Ultimate Friends Companion. “We had these funny lines, but they weren’t funny on him,” the writer said. “So we had to come up with lines that were Van Damme-proof. So I would say them in a really horrible French accent, putting the emphasis on the wrong word, and if people still laughed, then we pitched them to Van Damme. That’s how we came up with his [line]. ‘I can crack a walnut with my butt.’”

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7. Critics panned the episode.

“The One After the Superbowl” was not a super Friends episode in the minds of many critics. “‘TOATSB’ shows the writers felt the pressure of producing a megahit: The episode is fragmented, poorly paced, and only sporadically funny,” the Entertainment Weekly staff opined. “Cramming the already crowded ensemble with celebs may have been a ratings grabber … but the results are forced sitcomedy and stilted acting (that means you, Mr. Van Damme).”

Knight-Ridder Newspapers’ Tim Goodman cited the episode’s “pathetic infusion of ‘star appeal’” as a sign that Friends was “headed down the road to ruin.”

The Austin American-Statesman’s Diane Holloway said that Friends’ “overexposure reached critical mass on Super Bowl Sunday” and that the episode “had a couple of chuckles, but came off like a young Love Boat.”

Even Crane isn’t the biggest fan of the post-Super Bowl installment. “The episode isn’t in my top five,” he told THR. “We were much happier with six of them in the apartment and doing proposals and weddings and having babies. But given the marching orders, I think we did pretty well.”