Here’s how somebody who’s written about pop culture for a long time might react to that first realization that Netflix has told Matthew Perry’s life story in three parts for a three hour+ long series.
Perry? One hit TV show, a couple of decent movies and a long, sad struggle with the addictions that killed him in his 50s? Three hours on that/him? Talk about inflation.
“Sidney,” a doc about the culture shifting icon Sidney Poitier, covered more ground about a much more important figure in less than two hours. The equally beloved and equally tragic funnyman John Candy could have his cut-short-life story told in two hours in “I Like Me.”
And even a titanic figure in the history of cinema and comedy, Buster Keaton, whose life and career spanned vaudeville to “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” who merited a definitive TV documentary treatment way back in the ’80s, got a two-part “American Masters” celebration titled “Buster Keaton: A Hard At to Follow.” That ran two hours and forty minutes.
But if the greatest comic of his era, the writer, stand-up, comic actor, producer and art collector Steve Martin was worth three hours (“Steve! (Martin): A Documentary in Two Parts”), so is the tragic and funny Matthew Perry. I guess.
Besides, the suits at the streamer Netflix reasoned. America can’t get enough of those “Friends.”
The object of director Mary Robert’s three-part series is straightforward. If American TV taught us that “Your workplace is your other family,” starting with “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and “Friends” underscored that when you’re young and starting out, “Your friends are your family.” “The One About Matthew Perry” gives the troubled funnyman back to his “real” family — his siblings, his lifelong friends (not the “Friends” from TV) and his (less famous) lovers.
It’s a way of taking Perry away from the TMZs and tabloids, the scandals and struggles and downward spiral and Reddit threads about it. And it’s a way of highlighting the Tortured-Life-in-Showbiz prediction that a friend recalled Perry himself making, in writing, late in life with his memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.”
“It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one.”
We see the funnyman-in-the-making via several forgotten TV shows lost to memory, but which taught him timing, and meet the pals he hung around with who practiced mugging, pratfalls and what became Perry’s signature, quizzical line readings.
“Could she BE any more out of my league?”
The first of the three episodes set up how word got around to the struggling but semi-successful (he’d starred and co-starred in a couple of short-lived series) neurotic that NBC had this pilot they were shooting with a “dry, wry, commentator on his friends'” character.
“That’s YOU,” everybody who knew Perry told him. If only he could get an audition!
“Hi, I’m Chandler, I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable,” he’d soon be reciting. “”Oh, that makes me feels so warm in my hollow tin chest.” And whenever the Chandler/Matthew line was seriously blurred a writer would have him blurt out “I’m hopeless and awkward and desperate for love!” and the like.
From 1994 to the end of his days, Matthew Perry would be world famous, wildly popular, rich and able to (uncomfortably, it’s implied) “play the field” as far as female companionship was concerned.
Episode Two digs into that fame and its quickly-realized downside — failed relationships, PR dating (Julia Roberts, Selma Blair), attempts to break through in movies, the accident that brought painkillers into this hard-drinker’s life. And Episode Three is almost entirely about the downward slide towards Perry’s death, despite a life that was being repurposed towards helping others cope with the sorts of things he was going through.
The “Friends” and “Fools Rush In” and “The Whole Nine Yards” snippets of Perry being Perry suggest that this documentary series might have started out as basically a really good excuse for the ultimate Perry/”Friends” clip show.
But the effect is to give his fans reason to mourn him all over again, and give even cynics pause at the terrible battle — 12 step meetings, three times a day during stretches, over a dozen trips to rehab, a near death experience not long before the real thing — Perry waged for decades with his “Am I enough? Am I funny enough?” demons.
Director Robertson, who did “The Fall of Diddy,” had access to decades of footage of Perry being interviewed, Perry on sets and Perry being pursued — at a saunter — by paparazzi and TMZ types. He seemed to be handling all that, part of the “fame” he once bargained with God to get, better than most anybody. Until that first trip to rehab.
Warren Littlefield, president of NBC when “Friends” was being pitched, one of the series creators’ and one of the writers set up the lightning bolt that struck the moment Perry walked in to audition and win the “hardest and last role cast” in that series.
Childhood pal Roger Castillo and Hollywood chum, character actor David Pressman (like Perry, the son of a character actor and a Hollywood “nepo baby”) are great at filling in the picture of Perry when he was off script and off-the-clock — charming, funny, loyal to friends, like the addict/restaurateur he met at AA who says Perry “saved my life” (Tim Harrington).
Comic actor, impressionist and longtime podcast host Kevin Pollack is the most famous face interviewed here, a friend who knows funny and knew how funny Perry was and got him to open up about career insecurities and his substance use struggles in between funny stories about working with Bruce Willis and the like. Pollack’s seriousness here has a hollowed-out feel. Like many, he lost a close friend when Perry died in 2023.
But the series hangs on Perry’s often-revealing and honest (if guarded) interviews, and the thoughts and worries of his psychotherapist half-sister Mia, who grounds the narrative and provides insights nobody else could offer.
Robertson not landing any of Perry’s famous “love affairs,” reminds us of how such romances are set up and played by every generation’s Jennifer Lopez, Julia Roberts or Brad Pitt. But remembering how calculating Roberts’ dating agenda in the ’90s was would have hijacked the movie, which is about the Guy who Had it All and felt empty and the need to numb the emptiness even after the pains that his painkillers were for subsided.
The film underscores its own overkill-the-subject aura by serving up samples of the many series Perry made, before and after “Friends,” none of them burnishing his reputation or remotely memorable. The movies, after a couple of hits, barely amounted to a ripple on the pop culture waters.
Perry was famous for “Friends” and for being an incurable addict, and that’s it.
And for all its running time, one could hardly call “The One About Matthew Perry” as thorough as you’d expect. There’s precious little about his childhood; the son of a character actor, parents split, TV newsman Keith Morrison married his mother, siblings by two different mothers/fathers, etc. That isn’t served up in a straight chronology. Those tidbits are woven into the three episodes, which tend to treat that childhood as Canada/California privileged but far less than ideal.
But letting family and friends focus attention on Perry’s efforts to help others suffering through addiction points to a path his life might have taken. And punching through the circumstances of his death and the prosecution of those deemed responsible (with widely varying prison sentences doled out) adds bitter poignancy to the loss.
“Excuse for a clip show” or not, “The One About Matthew Perry” highlights the sort of folks who pursue fame, heedless of its consequences, and suggests how few of us could figure out a way to handle it or get useful help from friends, family and the rest of one’s support system to make it survivable.
Perry got this much right. It’s always a “shock” when somebody famous from that world has their life cut short by “Hollywood” — however the method. But it’s rarely a surprise.
Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse discussions, profanity
Cast: Matthew Perry, Mia Perry Bowick,
René Ashton, Warren Littlefield, Roger Castillo, David Pressman, Doug Draizin, Mary McNamara, Jonathan Lynn, Tim Harrington and Kevin Pollack.
Credits: Directed by Mary Robertson. A Netflix release.
Running time: Three episodes @1:01 each
