Friends stars have been the best of pals for 20 years!

“The chemistry between the six stars was a big reason it lasted for 10 years.”

It’s Autumn here in California when the leaves turn brown, the weather drops to a chilly 25C and there’s loads of new shows on the telly.

The Fall season is the most important for television. The network channels launch their big budget new shows, and small screen aficionados line up to give the thumbs up or down.

Failure means the show is cancelled after only a few episodes. Success can be stratospheric.

Take this week’s celebrations for one of the biggest shows of all time. Twenty years ago, Friends, a show about six twentysomething pals trying to make a life for themselves in Manhattan, launched on NBC.

In 1994, the show’s bosses took the cast to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas for dinner.

They told Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer that this would be the last time they’d be able to enjoy a dinner together in peace.

He wasn’t wrong if that lot got together for a bite to eat now there would be a stampede of fans and media.

It’s a bit like when I come back to the UK, except folk are usually running as fast as they can in the other direction.

I visited Burbank Studios, where Friends was filmed, last week. The show was filmed in California but is obviously heavily linked to New York.

In fact you still get tourists trying to find Central Perk, the world’s most famous fictional coffee shop.

I got to muck about on that fountain at Burbank Studios. It’s probably the third-most famous fountain of all time now, after the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas and Rome’s Trevi Fountain.

“It’s quite lovely, it’s nostalgic,” Jennifer Aniston told me a couple of weeks ago when I got the chance to speak to her about the sitcom that really supercharged her career.

“It represents a period of time that was really adorable. We were all so young, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

They certainly were. And it wasn’t just the six stars that managed to find fame. Even the bit-part characters became household names.

Remember Janice, or Ugly Naked Guy, or lovelorn coffee shop manager Gunther?

James Michael Taylor played Gunther and it was his barista skills that landed him the job.

The show’s director needed someone for a small speaking role who could work a coffee machine and he was the only able extra on set.

So it pays to diversify. I might buy an apron in case the telly work dries up.

“I walked on the set and I saw all these people joking around, talking and hugging,” Taylor told me last week. “They acted like they’d known each other since they were children.”

The chemistry between the six stars was a big reason it lasted for 10 years.

Christina Pickles played Ross and Monica’s mum, and she told me she loved working with Matt LeBlanc. He was a great flirt and gave her the full “How you doin?” treatment.

How many new shows debuting on television this Autumn would love half the level of Friends’ success?

My pal, dashing Welsh hunk Ioan Gruffud, is starring in a fantasy crime drama Forever. He plays a medical examiner who’s immortal. Every time he dies he has to emerge from the Hudson River naked.

Ioan told me he thinks he’s just a skinny little Welsh boy, so he’s been hitting the gym.

It’s too early to say if Forever will be a stick-on hit it is incredibly difficult to predict which ones will make it to a second series, and which will be ignominiously cancelled.

One that did make it as far as a second series is dark cop thriller True Detective.

The first series aired on HBO in the US and Sky Atlantic in the UK and is credited with helping drag Matthew McConaghey back into bona fida credibility.

Colin Farrell, Vince Vaughn and Rachel McAdam have so far been cast.

Irishman Farrell will be good but I’m interested to see how Vaughn, who’s been in a slew of silly comedies playing oafish best friends, tackles the role.

Who knows, maybe he’ll “do a Matthew”?