Marta Kauffman, one of the co-creators of Friends, was asked this week about the possibility of an official reunion for the show. The question came during a Friends retrospective panel at the Austin Film Festival.
Her answer might disappoint some fans out there: getting the gang back together at Central Perk isn't something she wants to do.
“They’d all be older, and it wouldn’t be the same, and people will only end up feeling disappointed, and then I’ll be embarrassed, and it would be terrible,” she said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
While that might not be the answer fans were hoping for, she has some great logic to back it up: The show was about a group of friends at a very particular time in their lives. The "magic" in the storytelling came from the transitions from college to adulthood, like from living in your grandmother's apartment to making a life of your own. Seeing Joey Tribbiani as a middle-aged man might not be as much fun. Monica and Chandler as a pair of sitcom parents navigating life with a middle-schooler would be an entirely different show.
Luckily, for die-hard fans, several of the on-screen Friends are off-screen pals, so they pop up in each other's lives and projects all the time. In fact, just last month, Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow killed it on Celebrity Name Game. Mini-reunions like that, at least for now, and at least according to Kauffman, are going to have to be enough.