With ‘Friends’ Like These, Who Needs Lovers? : Television: Relationships on NBC’s hit sitcom are strictly platonic, but is it realistic to expect they’ll remain that way?

The friends on “Friends” are all, at least for now, “just friends.” And it’s the appeal of that inviolable group bond that has helped make the rookie NBC sitcom a favored companion of young adults across the country.

The show’s core characters--three men and three women in their 20s--do date outside their circle, mostly ineptly, then rush back to the gang for advice, consolation and unconditional love.

But the young, unmarried performers on the show are skeptical that such a group could exist platonically for very long. The actors, in particular, say they wouldn’t hesitate to date the female characters if they encountered them in real life.

“They’re all definitely date-able,” said Matthew Perry, the actor who plays Chandler, an emotionally repressed, funny guy with constant woman troubles. “They’re all very attractive and funny and interesting in their own way. And,” he quipped, “because they are characters, they can’t say anything that isn’t written for them, and that makes them ideal dates. I could write out their responses, things like, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ or ‘Let me pay.’ ”

The actresses weren’t quite so enthusiastic about the male characters’ prospects, at least for anything long term.

“The guys all seem to be really good people, but . . . “ said Lisa Kudrow, who plays Phoebe, the show’s phreaky , spiritual fool/truthsayer. “Ross (David Schwimmer) is kind of a babyish, petulant prince. Chandler is so repressed he can’t deal with anything and turns it all into a big joke. And Joey (Matt LeBlanc) is just a girl’s nightmare, very sweet, but you know he’s always going to cheat.”

Courteney Cox, who plays the overzealously organized mother figure of the group, agreed that while the male characters would be a kick to talk to at a party, none is really “Courteney’s type.”

“I definitely have friends who are like all of them,” she said. “The Ross character, who is so vulnerable you just want to put your arm around and protect him. Chandler, who is hysterical, but is way too insecure for a relationship. And Joey--Joeys are everywhere. But I don’t think I could get involved with any of them. I usually go for the older men.”

Jennifer Aniston, who portrays Rachel, a lost soul prima donna out on her own without Daddy’s credit cards for the first time, admitted that she might be attracted to a man like Chandler simply because it would be “a challenge” to break through his emotional armor.

But more likely, she said, she’d content herself with making friends with any of the personalities portrayed on the series.

Such platonic friendships are common among young adults in their 20s and 30s, each member of the cast contended, although Kudrow said that such big group attachments were more the norm in college, and Cox wondered how the six of them--all supposedly employed--have so much time to just hang out together.

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But no matter how normal, most agreed that such male-female friendships are fraught with more sexual peril than the show has allowed. To date, the only hint of attraction or romance among the group has been a silent crush that the divorced Ross has on the absolutely oblivious Rachel.

In interviews during rehearsals on their Burbank set, several of the actors echoed Billy Crystal’s line in the movie “When Harry Met Sally . . . “--that men and women can’t really be friends because the guy is always interested in sex.

“Usually, with most men,” Kudrow said, “they are friends with a girl, hoping that one day she’ll get drunk and say, ‘Oh, I’m in a mood. Oh, you’re here. OK.’ It seems like they stick around like that until they realize it’s never going to happen and they give up, and maybe then you are friends.”

“I think there is probably more sexual stuff involved in actual life than you see on the show,” said LeBlanc, who plays the dim, womanizing Joey. “I mean, we’re very sexual beings, and I think curiosity killed the cat. When a man and woman become friends, it’s a constant and tricky decision-making process: ‘Should we, shouldn’t we, and will it wreck the friendship?’ Hopefully, you’ll see some of that in this show. I mean, I’m always hoping to get a little something.”

And that’s just what the producers promise. “This is our first season. Who knows who will sleep with who?” said Marta Kauffman, one of the executive producers of the series, along with David Crane and Kevin Bright.

Kauffman defended the “Friends” premise, however. Sexual tension exists between certain men and women in the workplace or in groups of friends, she noted, but that doesn’t mean people always act on it or that it precludes their having a very fulfilling, platonic relationship.

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Yet the flip side, Kauffman acknowledged, is that because a person feels especially comfortable with a dear friend of the opposite sex, it’s sometimes too easy to turn to that pal inadvertently for a deeper kind of intimacy on a cold, lonely night. She predicted that the show will likely exploit just such an experience down the road with an eye toward how it splits loyalties and mucks with the dynamics of the group.

“We have no idea who will end up with who,” Aniston said. “I actually am a part of a group of friends like this and occasionally those lines have been crossed, and sometimes it’s really weird and ugly if it doesn’t work out and sometimes it’s wonderful. I met my boyfriend in this group and we were just friends at first. Who knew?”

Ultimately, however, the show is called “Friends,” not “Lovers,” and Schwimmer trusts that even if his character’s unrequited crush blossoms into a sexy caress, the show’s cornerstone belief--”that friendships are stronger than any moment of fleeting passion”--will rule the following day.

* “Friends” airs Thursdays at 8:30 p.m. on NBC (Channels 4, 36 and 39).