The news of TV star Matthew Perry’s death yesterday, hit me like a ton of bricks. The 54-year-old actor, was found unresponsive after an apparent drowning, his representative told NBC News.
I instantly started googling; watching the social media tributes flood in and welling up at short clips shared of his greatest TV moments.
The show Friends, for which Perry was most beloved, was a hallmark of my childhood (and millions of other children of the nineties).
Typically devout ABC-only viewers, my parents made an exception for the gentle sitcom that was quickly garnering rave reviews. As a family, we’d sit together, relishing 30-minutes of easy entertainment that was uniquely suitable for all ages.
As I grew older, Friends never lost its impact. In truth, it became more significant.
As a 19-year-old experiencing an earth-shattering breakup, Friends was the only tonic. So much so, that a beautiful friend (in real life) bought me the entire box set, and spent four days with me devouring every precious line of witty repartee.
It peppered pivotal scenes for me during my time at university with long hungover mornings in doonas with flatmates…
Then, several years later, as a first-time mum during COVID, I developed chronic insomnia. Night after night, I’d lie on the couch with Friends quietly streaming in the background. The doom of continuous nights of no sleep were made significantly more bearable by the presence of Ross, Rachel, Monica, Phoebe and, Chandler. Always Chandler.
Matthew Perry’s portrayal of the goofy, emotionally-stunted, infinitely kind, and endlessly sarcastic character, was nothing short of masterful. His jokes (frequently ad-libbed) rarely fell short of the mark.
As the show’s co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane and executive producer Kevin Bright shared yesterday: “he was always the funniest person in the room”.
“All we can say is that we feel blessed to have had him as part of our lives. He was a brilliant talent. It’s a cliche to say that an actor makes a role their own, but in Matthew’s case, there are no truer words.”
This kind of warmth, familiarity and connection is hard to find in TV land. I’ve never felt it replicated in quite the same way as Friends managed to achieve through its characters. The dynamic between the six cast-mates was genius– they were so clearly, as the theme song suggested, there for each other.
Of course, Perry alluded to this in his recent memoir where he spoke of his co-stars rallying around him during his struggles with addiction. “It’s like penguins. Penguins, in nature, when one is sick, or when one is very injured, the other penguins surround it and prop it up. “They walk around it until that penguin can walk on its own,” he wrote.
And Friends quickly became the TV-equivalent of penguin solidarity for millions of people around the world.
The psychological impact of the series is profound. It has helped people connect, escape, reminisce and find moments of unadulterated joy in periods of turmoil. Matthew Perry’s talent was central to that.
As a person who has never met him, it seems self-indulgent to grieve his death, and in a world of unthinkable atrocities (amplified tenfold in the past few weeks) even more so.
But ultimately? We’re human. And celebrity deaths have the capacity to make us feel profoundly sad. It is the grief of a lost connection, their lost potential, our own mortality faced, and the void their death leaves in society.
In the case of Matthew Perry, it truly is the loss of a friend.