‘The One About Matthew Perry’ Netflix Review: Behind the Fame of ‘Friends’, a Lifelong Battle With Addiction

Matthew Perry’s early death, at 54, was eerily close to what he himself had predicted. “Shocking, but not surprising.” The life of the Friends actor had been an extraordinarily complicated one, a long series of ups and downs tied to his addictions — alcohol first, then various drugs and prescription medications — that gradually transformed him from the television superstar of the 1990s into someone struggling to survive his own demons and ghosts. This three-hour documentary series, in which one of his sisters, some close friends and a handful of celebrities tell his story, attempts to portray a man who could never quite overcome his addictions, no matter how relentlessly he tried over the course of several decades.

“God, you can do whatever you want to me, but make me famous,” Perry said he once prayed, back when he had yet to become a star and was just another one of the many actors trying to make it in Hollywood. “Three weeks later I got the part on Friends… but God didn’t forget about the other part,” he continued. His life was a mixture of humor and tragedy, the story of a likable kid who wanted to succeed and be loved but eventually realized that fame means nothing if you can’t figure out how to live a good life around it. Perry got everything he had wanted — the millions he earned on the show allowed him to live comfortably despite his exorbitant spending — but he was never able to overcome his addictions. And it wasn’t for lack of trying.

The series follows the genre’s traditional template, combining interviews with people who knew him with archival footage of Perry throughout his career, both in the TV shows and movies he appeared in and in interviews and personal videos from different moments in his life. The first episode looks at his family life — enough to understand some of the difficulties of having parents who were separated and living in Montreal and Los Angeles, respectively — before covering his early days in Hollywood, his landing of the role of Chandler Bing on the most successful sitcom of the 1990s, and the success that followed. The second focuses on the growing role his addictions played while he was on Friends and on his subsequent career as an actor, one that had more failures than successes. The third centers on his deepest descent into addiction, the various painful sacrifices he made in an effort to overcome it, and the police investigation into his death.

It’s a partial account — none of the other Friends cast members appear — and given the notoriety of both the case and the man himself, it’s easy to imagine that other documentaries are already in the works. Warren Littlefield, the NBC president who gave the show the green light, does speak, along with one of the writers and a few others. There are also two friends from his early Hollywood days, actor and personal friend Kevin Pollak, some former girlfriends, and no more than half a dozen people who knew him and remained friends with him over the decades. But the central, organizing voice of the story belongs to his sister Mia Perry Bowick, 14 years younger than him and one of the people closest to “Matty.”

It’s true that The One About Matthew Perry tells the story of a tragedy foretold — his addictions were already a serious problem by the middle of Friends — but that doesn’t make it any less painful. Trajectories like Perry’s are bitter not only because of the undeniable talent and comic timing he possessed, but because of the extraordinary efforts and sacrifices he made to overcome his addictions. Anecdotes from sets, successes and failures (The Whole Nine Yards and Studio 60 may be the most relevant examples in each category) accumulate to paint a portrait of a man who had everything but could never escape his darkest, most troubled places. Family, friends and collaborators all describe him as an affectionate, likable person, but also as someone who never quite figured out how to find his footing in that “acquired taste” (sic) people call life.