Do we like them?Do we like Marta Kauffman?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record, no harmful words found, and she has acted on her regrets, though the Friends-era blind spots keep it short of a 9.
Kauffman is the woman behind a good chunk of your TV childhood. She co-created HBO's Dream On with David Crane, then Friends, whose finale is among the most-watched episodes in TV history, and later Grace and Frankie with Howard J. Morris. That one ran seven seasons on Netflix, the streamer's longest-running original at the time.
Grace and Frankie is the telling one for this page. It put Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, then in their seventies, at the centre of a comedy about two women whose husbands come out as a gay couple. Kauffman said she wanted to explore ageing, sexuality in older women and being dismissed and marginalised.
The big stoush in her past is Friends itself, and she has copped plenty of criticism for how white it was. In 2022 she told the Los Angeles Times she was embarrassed she “didn't know better 25 years ago”. She backed it with a $4 million gift to her alma mater Brandeis to endow a professorship in African and African American Studies. She also said she wanted to actively pursue young writers of colour in her future shows, so this was action rather than a hollow sorry.
On the harm check, nothing nasty turned up in her own words or acts. The closest thing is the show's treatment of Chandler's trans parent, who was repeatedly referred to as his father. She told the BBC World Service in 2022 that was a mistake, saying pronouns were not something she understood then. She added that she once fired a crew member on the spot over a joke about a trans cameraperson, which is the sort of cost-to-yourself call that backs up the words.
She has also spoken about women in the industry. In a 2019 profile she said Hollywood still feels like a boys' club and that all you can currently ask is for men to behave better. In 2023 she was among the people President Biden announced for the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, an advisory panel on culture. We found no controversy over her politics beyond the Friends critiques, and nothing on climate or health claims either way.
The recent news is a happy one: DINKS, starring married couple June Diane Raphael and Paul Scheer with Jon Gabrus, has been ordered by Prime Video. She called it unique, hilarious and warm. The cast is small and the format is fresh, so there's nothing there to mark her down for. That said, the record is thinner on how she actually hires these days, so we'd call this a confident pass rather than a gushing one.