Before Central Perk became a pop-culture landmark and Ross and Rachel’s will-they-won’t-they dominated the 1990s, a different New York living room had already perfected the formula. In 1993, Living Single debuted on FOX, created by Yvette Lee Bowser. It starred six Black twenty-somethings navigating careers, love, and ambition inside a Brooklyn brownstone—and it became the highest-rated sitcom in Black households. One year later, NBC launched Friends, a show with strikingly familiar bones.
Originally, Bowser’s series carried the working title My Girls. The pilot centered on the sisterhood of Khadijah James, Synclaire James, Regine Hunter, and Maxine Shaw—played by Queen Latifah, Kim Coles, Kim Fields, and Erika Alexander—alongside Kyle Barker and Overton Wakefield Jones. In a 2025 episode of the ReLiving Single podcast, Queen Latifah revealed she had even recorded a different, soulful theme for My Girls before the show was retitled. When it became Living Single, she reworked the sound with producer Def Jef, creating the hip-hop-infused anthem audiences remember.
The controversy ignited with an offhand confession. In the early ’90s, Warren Littlefield, then president of NBC Entertainment, was asked which rival show he most wished he had. His answer: Living Single. Not long after, NBC commissioned a new sitcom from Marta Kauffman and David Crane. That project became Friends.
The parallels were hard to miss. Both series followed six friends (three women, three men) living in New York. Both featured related leads—Khadijah and Synclaire as cousins; Monica and Ross as siblings. Both relied on a “neighbor drop-in” engine—Kyle and Overton across the hall in Brooklyn; Joey and Chandler in Greenwich Village. Even the thematic pitch—friends as chosen family during early adulthood—was already weekly canon on FOX.
Despite being produced by Warner Bros. Television, the two shows experienced radically different fates. Living Single dominated its core audience for five seasons but never received the global marketing or syndication muscle that turned Friends into a billion-dollar franchise. Cast members like Erika Alexander have spoken openly about the erasure, and T. C. Carson was famously written off after pushing for parity.
Today, as Living Single finds new life on streaming platforms like Hulu, its legacy is finally being recalibrated. While Friends won the ratings war, Living Single built the blueprint—proving that the modern “hanging-out” sitcom was pioneered by a Black woman telling specific stories that turned out to be universal.