Courteney Cox Reflects on Friends’ 30th Anniversary: ‘It’s Just Insane’

Courteney Cox is celebrating 30 years of Friends.

“It’s just insane to me because it feels like time, it goes so fast and I don’t realize it,” the Monica Geller actress told People on Saturday, September 21, just one day ahead of the hit sitcom’s 30th anniversary. “We used to say, ‘Oh, I can’t wait for this month,’ or ‘God, it feels like forever.’ I would never say that line anymore.”

Friends turned 30 on Sunday, September 22, marking the anniversary of the very first episode premiering on NBC in 1994. For 10 seasons, viewers fell in love with Monica, Rachel (Jennifer Aniston), Ross (David Schwimmer), Phoebe (Lisa Kudrow), Chandler (Matthew Perry) and Joey (Matt LeBlanc) as they navigated their late 20s and early 30s in New York City.

To this day, new fans continue to discover the classic comedy via streaming services such as Max and Netflix, keeping Monica and company as relevant today as ever.

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“Monica is alive and well. Are you kidding?” Cox, 60, said of the show’s enduring legacy.

For Cox, it’s been a “little while” since she last saw an episode of Friends but told People, “Whenever I do come across it, I can’t help but [watch].”

“That show is incredible. Every joke holds up, all the characters are just so amazing, and we [had] the best writers in the world,” said the actress. “I’m lucky that it continues on through all the generations. And that’s very fortunate.”

Friends aired on NBC from September 22, 1994, to May 6, 2004. 52.5 million people watched the series finale in which Monica and Chandler said goodbye to their famous apartment and Ross and Rachel finally got together.

Off-screen, the Friends family was dealt a blow in October 2023 when Matthew Perry died from the “acute effects of ketamine.” A toxicology report also listed drowning, coronary artery disease and the effects of buprenorphine (which is used to treat opioid use) as contributing factors. He was 54.

The show’s cocreators Marta Kauffman and David Crane said during an appearance on the Today show on Friday, September 20, that Perry’s death cast a shadow over its 30th anniversary.

“It’s a huge loss and it does make the 30th a little fraught,” Kauffman said. David added: “He made us laugh every day.”

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Kauffman, 67, noted that “David always said [Matthew] was the funniest man in a room.”

“He’d been fighting the good fight for so long, and it did really like, from the reunion, that he had finally found some peace,” Friends executive producer Kevin Bright added, referring to the 2021 Friends reunion special on Max.