The one where a 'Friends' producer explains why Monica and Chandler got together

In 1998, the Friends writers had already boxed Ross and Rachel up into their controversial "break" and were exploring the romantic possibilities that might have been looming within the rest of the roommates. A year earlier, they had tossed the idea of getting Chandler and Monica together, but punted the idea for fear of becoming a show about people getting together and breaking up.

With Ross and Rachel temporarily out of the way, though, the show's producers and writers revisited the idea of a Monica/Chandler hookup and the infamous wedding scene was born.

Over at Vulture, they're in the middle of a tribute to the popular culture of 1998 (make your Marcy Playground jokes here). So, they spoke to Friends producers and real-life couple Scott Silveri and Shana Goldberg-Meehan about their fictional couple and the relationship sparks that started a fire for the second half of Friends' run. (+1 for the "Dancing in the Dark" joke?)

The take-it-slow approach also helped smooth out another potential pitfall of Monica-Chandler: the actors. The writers knew Perry and Cox, along with the other three series regulars, were protective of their alter egos, particularly when it came to romantic entanglements within the group. "I'm remembering there were a lot of conversations about, 'Is this the right thing to do?'," Silveri says. "I don't think anybody balked too much at them hooking up. That felt natural. The fallout came in the following year, when it became a relationship. They were acutely sensitive to how it played out." That hesitation, plus the writers' own doubts, helped shaped the first half of season five. "We plotted it out in a self-protective way," he says. "It wasn't a relationship [the other characters were] talking about. Nobody knew about it. We as writers were almost as protective of it as those characters were. We didn't want to make too much of a deal about it too early. That's what you saw on the screen, but it's also how we experienced it. We didn't want to spend too much too fast. We didn't want it to be high drama. So we just kept taking baby steps forward and feeling our way through." And it seemed to work: Audiences embraced the two as a couple, and Perry and Cox ultimately accepted the idea as well. "Because of the way we eased into it, we sort of greased the machine," Silveri says. [Vulture]