The One About Matthew Perry: a ‘thoughtful and genuinely intimate’ portrait

Netflix’s three-part documentary about Matthew Perry is “at heart a simple, sad story”, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. But the series is “unexpectedly candid, thoughtful and genuinely intimate”, helping to give “nuance and depth” to the life of the late actor and star of “Friends”.

You might expect his fellow “Friends” actors to feature in the documentary, said Carol Midgley in The Times. Instead it includes interviews with his “closest lifelong friends” and his sister, Mia Perry Bowick, who sketch a portrait of the “sensitive soul they loved and lost to a remorseless drug and alcohol addiction”.

In 2023, at the age of 54, Perry was found floating, face down, in a hot tub at his Los Angeles home. An autopsy found that he died from the acute effects of ketamine.

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Speaking to the people who “really knew him, long before he was famous” makes it feel as if we are getting the “full, complete picture” of Perry. This was a man who was “likeable, self-deprecating, hugely generous and considerate to his friends but who was also afraid of intimacy, the thing that, ironically, he craved most”.

The show serves as a “cautionary tale” about fame. Despite his privilege and “huge amounts of wealth”, he was also in the “dangerous position” of being surrounded by “vultures” who sought to exploit his addiction to “enrich themselves”. We learn about a doctor who overcharged him for ketamine, writing in a message: “I wonder how much this moron will pay”.

If director Mary Robertson had cut back the “generic padding” and trimmed the series down to a 100-minute feature-length documentary it “probably would have been a better project”, said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. Still, she handles the key moments with “subtlety and intimacy” and there’s “a lot of good stuff” in her “sincere and generally non-exploitative examination of addiction and celebrity”.

It’s a “tragic tale but a familiar one”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph. Perry was “desperate to be famous” so he could “distract everyone from how miserable he was by being funny. Chandler Bing in ‘Friends’, in other words, was his alter ego.”