Erika Alexander From ‘Living Single’ Claps Back At David Schwimmer
David Schwimmer, the current star of the Sky One and Now TV series Intelligence, tried to make a good faith effort at pitching an alternative to Friends featuring an “all-Black” and/or “all-Asian” cast, but didn’t realize that already existed.
In an interview with the Guardian, the Friends actor addressed the issues surrounding the NBC sitcom and its all-white cast.
"I feel that a lot of the problem today in so many areas is that so little is taken in context," he said. "You have to look at it from the point of view of what the show was trying to do at the time. I'm the first person to say that maybe something was inappropriate or insensitive, but I feel like my barometer was pretty good at that time. I was already really attuned to social issues and issues of equality."
That said, Schwimmer proposed some reboot ideas that were certainly not original.
"Maybe there should be an all-Black Friends or an all-Asian Friends," Schwimmer told the publication. "But I was well aware of the lack of diversity and I campaigned for years to have Ross date women of color. One of the first girlfriends I had on the show was an Asian American woman, and later I dated African American women. That was a very conscious push on my part."
David Schwimmer starred as Ross in Friends, which has been widely reported was a ripoff from Living Single. As Queen Latifah explained to James Corden back in June of 2016, the president of NBC explicitly copied Living Single to create Friends. The same amount of characters, living in an apartment building in New York City -- except Friends was all-white. Friends would last 10 seasons, while Living Single only lasted five.
Twitter dragged him.
Furthermore, Erika Alexander, who played Maxine Waters on Living Single, earning her two NAACP Image Awards, tweeted directly to Schwimmer, “Hey @DavidSchwimmer @FriendsTV - r u seriously telling me you’ve never heard of #LivingSingle? We invented the template! Yr welcome bro. ;) David Schwimmer 2 The Guardian: ‘Maybe there should be an all-black Friends or an all-Asian Friends.’”
See below:Schwimmer not knowing Living Single would be perplexing considering at one point the Yvette Lee Boswer show was put in the same time slot as Friends.
Watch John Henton, who played Overton “Obie” Wakefield Jones in Living Single, explain how frustrated he was in the clip below:
