'Living Single' star Erika Alexander calls out David Schwimmer for suggesting 'all-black' reboot of 'Friends'

Kamilah Newton
Updated ·4 min read

Despite David Schwimmer’s recent comments about his awareness of his own privilege 一 and calling for an “all-black” or “all-Asian” reboot of Friends — Erika Alexander has chimed in to remind him that Friends is actually the all-white reboot of 90’s sitcom Living Single.

This past Monday, during his Guardian interview, Schwimmer defended the modern-day criticisms of Friends, which claim that it lacked diversity and was tone-deaf on topics like body size and LGBTQ representation. While HBO Max is reportedly trying to get a televised reunion with the show’s stars off the ground, Schwimmer insisted that none of them want to revisit their old characters. “Maybe there should be an all-black Friends or an all-Asian Friends,” he mused. “I’m very aware of my own privilege as a heterosexual white male whose parents were able to pay for a private education for me. I’ve always felt a sense of responsibility to give back and to call things out if I see an abuse of power,” said the 53-year-old actor.

However, yesterday afternoon Alexander took to Twitter to address Schwimmer’s comments. In the tweet which now has over 6,000 likes and almost 2,000 retweets, she wrote, “Hey ⁦@DavidSchwimmer ⁦@FriendsTV⁩ - r u seriously telling me you’ve never heard of #LivingSingle? We invented the template! Yr welcome bro,” followed by a wink. The fans of Living Single have also taken to Twitter to remind “Ross” that it’s already been done.

In recent years, Alexander has been open about the fact that Living Single not only came before Friends, but downright inspired its creation. As she revealed during her 2018 interview with The Breakfast Club, even the name for Friends was taken from the development stage of its predecessor. She explained that the original name for Living Single was My Girls but it didn’t test well, so executives came up with some other names. Living Single and Friends were options on a list of names presented and “they chose Living Single for us and then the next year they created Friends,” says the actress.

She continued, “They both came from Warner Bros. We were on the ‘ranch lot’ and [Friends] was on the ‘big lot’ … We had nothing on that lot. We actually had no air conditioning. Our craft services table was basically rice with Tabasco sauce and Ritz crackers, but also what happened was the fact that we didn’t get the marketing … There were a lot of things that were in place to hold [us] down and make you not feel as valuable, but I’m sure if they looked and scaled, and looked at how much they made vs what they put in, I’m sure we’re on par if not way beyond what they made.”

When Schwimmer 一 who played “Ross” in the series, reflected on his show’s shortcomings he said, “I feel like my barometer was pretty good at that time. I was already really attuned to social issues and issues of equality.”

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