Matthew Perry wrote the book on his own addiction.
In 2022, his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing told, in variously disarming, graphic, unflattering and tremendously bleak detail, his life story, and all the ways in which his soul may not have been suited for the fame he desperately craved. His addiction to painkillers and alcohol led him to blow up his life and relationships over and over, forced him to spend decades in and out of treatment in hospitals and rehab facilities, and he declared, with prophetic self-awareness and morbid certainty, that eventually, in one way or another, it would kill him. Almost exactly one year later, it did.
It was not a happy book, and anyone who bought it hoping for a bit of Friends nostalgia and showbiz gossip will have been perturbed by the draining, sad slog of it all. But it was an enormous success, and striking in its honesty. Perry was the rare celebrity who possessed an ability to scrutinise and express his condition with such acuity in life that it ought to have rendered pointless any study of it in death.
But that won’t stop Netflix from cashing in, and so we have The One About Matthew Perry, a new three-part documentary that charts Perry’s life, from struggling actor to Chandler Bing to substance abuse campaigner, to his death, at the age of 54, from the acute effects of ketamine in the jacuzzi at his home in 2023.
Because it is Matthew Perry, and because of the overwhelming affection for Friends, a show whose ubiquity makes it hard to believe he really is gone, this documentary is bound to be a hit. It is made by Mary Robertson, who directed 2024’s Quiet on Set, about the toxic environments on 90s and 2000s TV productions, and features a number of Perry’s loved ones, most of all his own sister Mia Perry Bowick, sharing their experiences of the playful, generous, supportive man he could be, and the darkness of his addiction, which stemmed from his childhood and led to a lifelong need to prove himself, isolating pressure and a “sense of emptiness or loneliness”.
It is rich with archive clips, charming interviews from when Perry was on the ascent, and the use of his own soundbites – fame “didn’t fix what was inside of me”, he hauntingly “narrates” – means he feels ever-present. It is not revelatory – when he offered so much of this up, so recently, much of this inevitably feels like the same story, second-hand – but it is often moving. It is a testament to his lost talent, and it is tragic to see his loved ones, still shaken, ask themselves at what points they might have done more to help him. It’s even more tragic to hear how they accepted they couldn’t. His sister, after the 2021 Friends reunion in which Perry was visibly unwell, “started thinking of his disease as a terminal illness”.
It is when we reach the parts of Perry’s story that he could not tell himself that this series shifts away from a rehash and towards the uncomfortable. The circumstances around his death remain murky, those involved in his supply of ketamine have been, to varying degrees, prosecuted, and the whole sorry saga has become a sordid Hollywood story of its own.
The documentary rushes through this cursorily. While it is staggering to hear his sister describe Perry feeling that he could “see God in the ketamine”, and to see messages sent between drug-dealing doctors joking about “how much is this moron willing to pay?”, as he reportedly spent over $55k in one fortnight on it, it does not feel that much of an attempt has been made to uncover anything new or ask questions about what really happened, explore how wealthy addicts are open to exploitation, or examine why he broke his sobriety in the year he was receiving worldwide acclaim for his book, and everyone believed he was happy.
It would much rather dwell on what it all “felt like” for them when he finally died, and has several of his poor loved ones describe in unnecessary detail the exact moment at which they learned of his death, the camera lingering on them for long stretches as they break down remembering the phone calls they’d all spent a lifetime dreading. It is no less raw for the three years that have passed.
I have no doubt that amid the tabloid circus around Perry, some of his friends and family wanted an opportunity to say their piece – though it is obvious that most of them declined this one. But it feels like those who sincerely were in his life have been used, here, to lend legitimacy to a series that needed “access” to its subject, and which also invites obvious hangers-on to have their 15 minutes, too. Is it dignified or indeed ethical, for example, for someone who was in rehab with Perry to describe what he was like in group therapy?
No, it is intrusive, and I’m unsure of what it is supposed to be in service to. Not the viewer, who gains no further insight into Perry by seeing his relatives retraumatised – though I was moved to tears upon hearing how the five surviving Friends attended his funeral together and stood over his coffin, holding hands. And certainly not Perry, whose memory is far more respectfully cherished in his acting work, and whose struggles remain most powerfully articulated in his own words.