Jennifer Aniston almost had to leave Friends during its first season, a pop culture historian has revealed.
Saul Austerlitz, the author of the book Generation Friends, says in an excerpt published by Entertainment Weekly that Aniston had shot several episodes of a CBS sitcom titled Muddling Through early in Friends history.
According to EW, if Muddling Through was picked up, Aniston would have had to quit Friends, an NBC show, halfway through the first season.
Per Austerlitz, then-NBC boss Warren Littlefield and Preston Beckman, the network’s head of scheduling, decided to compete with Muddling Through by putting out a series of unreleased Danielle Steel film adaptations at the same time slot as the sitcom.
The rest is history: Muddling Through aired for just 10 episodes on CBS, between July and September 1994.
Aniston went on to play the iconic Rachel Green for all of Friends‘s 10 seasons.
Friends premiered in September 1994 and kept airing until May 2004.
