October 27, 2026 — 6:01pm

The One About Matthew Perry ★★

When an “authorised” celebrity docuseries boasts exclusive access to private archives and immediate family, we can be confident it’s going to lean towards hagiography, and this three-part series about Matthew Perry does just that. It’s less a deep dive and more a surface skim that provides little insight into the Friends star, who died of a drug overdose in 2023, aged 54.

Directed by filmmaker Emmy Award-winner Mary Robertson (whose most recent series include Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV and The Fall of Diddy), The One About Matthew Perry follows the well-worn path of celebrity documentaries that are afraid to offend. While pitched as a “celebration of Perry’s life”, in reality it’s a fawning, straightforward biography that stretches back to his childhood, mostly told by his half-sister Mia Perry Bowick, and two of his longtime mates, David Pressman and Roger Castillo.

Perry as Chandler Bing, with Courtney Cox as Monica Geller in Friends.NBCUniversal via Getty Images

We get the requisite childhood photos and footage, memories of Pressman, Castillo and others (among them Hank Azaria), but intriguingly, none of his castmates from Friends – Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Matt LeBlanc – take part. Perry’s sister puts this down to it being still too painful and raw for them to publicly revisit his death, but we’ll obviously never know.

By the end of the three-episode series though, it’s hard not to wonder if this is because perhaps they didn’t have only glowing things to say about the late actor. It’s not until past the two-hour mark that a negative thing is uttered, when a former girlfriend reveals Perry had been cheating on her for a year.

For fans of Friends, there is very little of the sitcom that made Perry a star. There’s a telling quote from Perry early on (and which he wrote about in his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing) in which he declares he asked God to “make me famous. You can do anything you want to me; just make me famous”.

This invocation obviously came true with the role of Chandler Bing – and the rest of his life.

We’re told Perry was “complex” and flawed” but given nothing below those surface descriptions. Even his addiction, we’re told, is caused by the opiates he was prescribed after a jetski accident; it’s not until the final episode that his struggle with depression is mentioned, his reason for using the Ketamine that would end his life.

There is his opiate-induced colon perforation, which almost killed him, his successful addiction advocacy, and a slew of former girlfriends and other talking heads, most of whom tell us that Perry was the comedic genius of his generation.

Perry with Mia Perry Bowick, who presents much of the docuseries.Courtesy of Netflix

But for fans who have read Perry’s memoir – by all accounts a much less unctuous account of his life – there are not many revelations. Unless you count the fact that his Friends castmates held hands as they walked to his coffin at his funeral, which sounds straight from the hands of the sitcom’s scriptwriters, frankly. But there are some shocking statistics. Perry reportedly spent more than $7 million on 15 stints in rehab throughout the years, 30 years in therapy, and attended some 6000 AA meetings.

This series is one for the hardcore fans, but I venture even they might find the three-hour duration at least an hour too long.

The One About Matthew Perry is now streaming on Netflix.

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Source: The Sydney Morning Herald · Kylie Northover

At a glance

Topic
World
Country
🇦🇺 AU
Publisher language
EN
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