How many seasons does the sitcom Friends have?

How to get close to this number

Network sitcoms that succeed run until the cast leaves, and a cast in their twenties at the start typically stays about a decade. Ten seasons is the canonical length for a hit American sitcom of that era, and several on this site land within one of it.

The salary detail in the explanation is the genuinely instructive part. The main cast negotiated as a single bloc from the third season onward, which meant the studio could not play them against each other, and by the end they were earning a million dollars an episode each. Collective bargaining by six people reshaped the economics of television casting for a generation.

That arrangement also explains the season count. A cast that negotiates together can also leave together, which gives them the power to end the show — and this one ended while still enormously popular, on the cast's terms rather than the network's. Series length is usually a negotiation outcome rather than a creative decision.