Matthew and Matt or Chandler and Joey? Photograph: AP: Lucy Nicholson
Poor Matt LeBlanc. Slap bang in the middle of a post-Joey career hiatus, his old manager decides to sue for over $1m for unpaid career advice. LeBlanc's future looks distinctly, well, blank. She clearly gave him the wrong sort of help.
Indeed, LeBlanc would have been better off consulting his former Friends. Take David Schwimmer. Revered as an actor of extraordinary comic ability, he's just directed his first feature film Run, Fat Boy, Run. Then there's Lisa Kudrow, irritatingly over-weird but nonetheless a stalwart of dark art-house comedies who will appear in the forthcoming PS I Love You with Hilary Swank. From being the poster girl for OCD Anonymous, Courtney Cox Arquette has found success in Dirt, the brilliant if homily-packed satire on gossip magazines. Which leads us nicely to Jennifer Aniston, who cameoed on the show. Apparently she's no longer engaged to the bloke off the Toyota Highlander advert but so long as she steers clear of those creepy Freudian lads mag covers, she'll doubtless pull through. And so to Matthew Perry.
He's starring as comedy writer Matt Albie in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the superb TV show about a TV show which, absurdly, lost its primetime slot in the US. So far, so postmodern, and that's before the celebrity cameos really take off. It's certainly the finest US import of the season and it sure as hell beats the super-smug Brothers "ooh, we never wanted to go to war but look how sensitive these Republicans can be" and Sisters.
What really strikes me about these post-Friends careers is the spooky way their actual lives imitate their fictional traits - Cox Arquette forging a career out of Monica's anality; Kudrow playing the zany person she claims to have been; Aniston incessantly falling for the wrong man; Schwimmer, the "intellectual", deciding to go behind the camera and LeBlanc and Perry playing versions of themselves.
Giving Perry's latest character an addiction to prescription drugs is perhaps going a little far, but I expect this is just how it'll pan out. After 236 episodes of Friends, the point where LeBlanc begins and Joey ends has disappeared. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy and would surely have been hidden in the fine print of any worthwhile sitcom contract.
