Mr. Showbiz News:  Schwimmer's Friends Solidarity

How much longer will Friends be there for NBC?  Earlier this year the network inked a deal with Warner Bros. Television to keep the popular sitcom in production into 2002, but the cast members are only under contract through the end of this season.

There's been much speculation about the dollar amount Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox Arquette, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer will be offered to re-up -- the most frequently quoted ballpark figure is $250,000 apiece per episode.  Schwimmer doesn't talk dollars and cents in an interview in the New York Daily News, but he does say extending his own commitment to the show is conditional.

"I don't know," he says, when asked whether he and his castmates are going to be sticking together for the long haul.  "My hopes is that we are."  As Schwimmer sees it, however, Must-See TV's staple series will only continue "if the six of us are doing it."

The 32-year-old star, who directed the episode that airs this Thursday, The One on the Last Night, says no official salary negotiations have taken place yet.  "I have no idea what the [contract] status is.  We haven't talked about it in months.  We've always been together; we always will."

The famous solidarity of the Friends posse is alive and thriving, it would seem.  The show's six stars were thick as thieves in 1997 when they banded together to negotiate their current contract.  That deal pays them around $125,000 per episode -- chump change when you consider what the stars of Seinfeld were raking in by the end of that series' run, but Schwimmer remembers when it was seen differently.

He tells the News that he and his co-stars took "a huge amount of flak" over their lucrative new deal at the time.  Not that he can't see the forest for the trees -- Schwimmer acknowledges that he and his fellows make a "ridiculous" amount of dough for doing something they all enjoy.  "You just have to be incredibly grateful, and we are."

All together now: Awww.