Matthew Perry, who died last weekend aged 54, published his memoir almost exactly a year ago to the day. Its opening line reads: “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.” This kind of tragic irony came to typify the life of the star.
Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing chronicled Perry’s time on the stratospherically successful TV show, Friends. But more than that it was a book that gave a voice to the loneliness inherent to addiction. Perry struggled with alcohol, prescription painkillers and spent his life yo-yoing between rehab facilities. It is an all too common tale for the megastars of 90s and 00s Hollywood.
For most people, however – in fact, the tens of millions who tuned in for Friends at the time – Perry was not first and foremost this man mired in anguish, but instead he was Chandler Bing. The sardonic, quippy, smart member of the gang who lived in an impossibly large apartment on Manhattan’s West Side; a normal person with a white collar job and a girlfriend and hours to wile away in a coffee shop. Perry was Chandler – the man who ultimately married Monica and moved to the suburbs, for whom everything worked out.
Perry’s death has – in a similarly tragically ironic way – brought Chandler back to life in our imaginations. Friends – which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004 – was impossibly zeitgeisty. It represented the apogee of prime time TV, when the world tuned in together for a shared experience. It was a unifying cultural moment that, in an age of streaming services, is increasingly rare.
Chandler belonged first to the Gen Xers who watched the gang of six navigate their late 20s in real time. It first aired the year before I was born. So I am far from the generation that grew up with it contemporaneously. It would be a long time before I could watch and relate. But, like almost all of my peers, I still did grow up with it and I could eventually relate. Just twenty years later. Because Friends was not a TV show about the late 90s, decipherable only for those who lived through it, it was a TV show about the slow march of adolescence to adulthood, that inescapable fact of life no matter the generation.
This is its enduring legacy. The ‘Rachel’ haircut hasn’t been in vogue for years; the apartment’s decor is dated; the laugh track that punctuates the script is especially wince-inducing for anyone under the age of 30. But these are background irrelevances. Friends instead aspired to a mode of timelessness that most sitcoms fail to achieve. That is precisely why its popularity relapses every few years.
Its manifesto is simple. There are universal truths to youth: work is hard and people lose their jobs – Monica is fired as a chef after a supplier mixup; friends have unequal amounts of money and this can generate terrible awkwardness – Joey orders the cheapest thing on the menu and is devastated when he learns the gang plans to split the bill evenly; people breakup and move on – the Ross and Rachel romance plot is interminable and very real. But underpinning all of this, Friends says that there will always be time to meet for coffee, that the world is banal and most conversations are inane, that there is a time in your life – as co-creator David Crane says – “when your friends were your family.”
This kind of poptimism is derided as saccharine and twee. In recent years Friends endured a rather harsh reappraisal. “How Friends ruined TV comedy” ran one headline in Vox; “21 Times ‘Friends’ Was Actually Really Problematic” barked Buzzfeed. The criticism is sweeping and the entire premise of Friends is dismissed as unrealistic: who can afford an apartment like that? Where do these people get all their free time? Even the theme song is cast aside as banal and mawkish. Friends is accused of papering over the cracks of a different world.
We might suggest the critics lighten up. In such a vision of the world we would have fewer gags in coffee shops and more scandi-noir musings on the human condition. It is not my idea of a diverse and enticing cultural landscape. But in the wake of Perry’s death this cynicism might ebb. And the realisation will be forced: TV can speak to universal truths while not being desperately serious or immediately relatable. In fact, the hopefulness inherent to the soul of Friends is something we could do with a lot more of. For all the bitter humour of Frasier and the scorn of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the sweetness of Friends makes it no less serious.
In Perry’s memoir he explains that the highest points of his career were matched with lowest points of his private life – after his on-screen marriage to Monica he was taken straight to rehab. It is desperately sad. So we ought not forget what Perry gave us with Chandler and with it the whole universe of Friends. That no matter how awful the world might be there is still a group of friends having coffee together somewhere. What could be more real than that?