There is a reason the sitcom Friends was so popular from the off and became such a juggernaut so quickly. The writing was brilliant, and the six actors in it were astonishing individually and even better together. Comedy is alchemical, and they transmuted gold into pure joy.
Matthew Perry formed one sixth of the troupe as Chandler Bing. Every actor had their particular strength and his was perhaps to be the nimblest, the most alive to the currents crisscrossing any scene he was in. He was the only one of the cast allowed in the writers’ room to contribute, and from that maybe we can infer he was the most naturally funny off set too. Certainly his timing, even in the extraordinary company he kept, was immaculate.
And now we know that the rumours of addiction that plagued him during the filming and broadcast of later seasons were true. As he put it in the autobiography he published in 2022, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, when Chandler was overweight, Perry was on the booze; when he was skinny, it was pills. But it was almost always something. A year after the book came out, Perry, 54, was found dead – drowned in his pool after suffering the acute effects of ketamine use.
Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy, an hour-long documentary imported from the US by ITV, covers this sad story much as you might expect. There is footage from Friends’ glory days, plus telling footage of the battery of paparazzi yelling for his attention every time he stepped out in public. There are clips of interviews with his castmates lauding his talents back in the day, and grief-stricken ones from his great friend Hank Azaria and others after his death. Azaria is on the verge of tears as he remembers how Perry would floor his friends with laughter when he was healthy, and how so many of those who loved him felt they had lost him years before to his demons.
There are excerpts from the audio version of his book read by Perry himself, which supply glimpses of his inner torment and memories of the aspects of his childhood to which he attributes his vulnerability to addiction; and portions of interviews where you see his charm and some of his pain. There is not much of his work in Friends on display, but such was – and remains – the pervasiveness of the show that perhaps it wasn’t felt necessary to remind us. Morgan Fairchild, who played Chandler’s mother in the series, contributes some nice and not excessively saccharine memories of him as an actor and of the difficulty in making a difference to someone who is not yet ready to deal with his problems.
Still, it feels like the background is being skimped to get to the “good” stuff: the criminal investigation sparked by his death and the recent charges brought against five people for supplying the ketamine that led to Perry’s death. Again, this is covered much as you might expect. Talking heads from the world of entertainment journalism are interwoven with accounts from retired LAPD officers explaining how police procedures work, and the district attorney in charge of the case is on hand in the sharpest of suits to explain how they discovered – and you’re hardly going to believe this, I know – a network of suppliers in Los Angeles that were able to get a celebrity as much of his chosen narcotic as he asked for, often at inflated prices. One of the doctors allegedly involved in the chain messages another: “I wonder how much this moron will pay … Let’s find out.” The headshaking at this lack of respect between a man and his cash cow becomes almost comical.
Amid the accumulating disingenuousness, the documentary does have the grace to include the name of Cody McLaury, whose death has also been attributed to ketamine supposedly supplied by one of the five suspects in Perry’s case, and to include a comment from one of the contributors that it was surely largely because of Perry’s fame that a criminal investigation was launched into the actor’s death at all.
The film ends, however, with unexpected delicacy, closing with the shot of a card left with flowers at his home by one of Perry’s many fans. “Thank you for making me laugh,” it says. “I’m glad Chandler got the happy ending you deserved.” A grace note Perry surely earned.
• Matthew Perry: A Hollywood Tragedy aired on ITV1 and is on ITVX now. In the US, it is available to stream on Peacock.
