During a section on the popularity of famous ’90s sitcom Friends on CNN’s special History of the Sitcom, the lack of diversity on the program was once again brought to the forefront.

Former Designing Women actress Sheryl Lee Ralph brought up the subject in this special.

She said, “I never watched Friends because they could not possibly find a way to add anybody of color.”

Marta Kauffman, the program’s co-creator, addressed the significant issue while taking some of the blame. According to Entertainment Weekly, he confessed that, “It was, to a certain extent, a product of the time period and of my own ignorance.

“There were Black shows and there were white shows. There weren’t a lot of shows that were interracial.”

Friends aired from 1994 to 2004 and starred six white friends in New York City, as well as primarily white recurrent guest actors, over a ten-year period, with the exception of two of Ross’s (David Schwimmer) girlfriends. In an interview with The Guardian last year, Schwimmer confessed that this was something he pushed for.

The writer and producer isn’t the first to bring up the issue of the mostly white extended ensemble. During a discussion at the ATX TV Festival last year, the creator highlighted the lack of diversity.

“We’ve always encouraged people of diversity in our company,” she continued, per Deadline, “but I didn’t do enough. Now all I can think about is what can I do? What can I do differently? How can I run my show in a new way? “I wish I knew then what I knew today, I would have made very different decisions,” she said

The program was simply based on her and her lifelong friend, and another Friends co-creator, David Crane’s life experiences.

“I guess at the time I was thinking, ‘This is what I know. This is what I know,’” Kauffman said.

While the comedy fell short on the diversity front, some of the show’s performers have pointed out how the sitcom was progressive in other ways for its time. “The truth is also that show was groundbreaking in its time for the way it handled so casually sex, protected sex, gay marriage and relationships,” David Schwimmer, who portrayed Ross Gellar, told The Guardian in January 2020. “The pilot of the show was my character’s wife left him for a woman and there was a gay wedding, of my ex and her wife, that I attended.”

Lauren Tom and Aisha Tyler played his character’s girlfriends throughout the course of the series. “Maybe there should be an all-black ‘Friends’ or an all-Asian ‘Friends,'” Schwimmer told The Guardian. “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.”