Every day, tourists in New York gather at the corner of Bedford Street and Grove Street to pay homage to a nondescript six-storey building—it’s the Friends building where Chandler Bing still lives.
Matthew Perry is dead. And Chandler Bing is forever trapped on the orange couch at Central Perk or that ugly black recliner at his apartment, spouting sarcastic one-liners while his friends analyse his third nipple.
NBC’s 1990s hit Friends—where Perry played Bing alongside Jennifer Aniston (Rachel Green), Matt LeBlanc (Joey Tribbiani), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay), David Schwimmer (Ross Geller) and Courteney Cox (Monica Geller)—did not age well. It was White, privileged, flawed, at times atonal, and morphed into a soap opera in its later seasons. Character foibles became more and more exaggerated with every season.
But the show, which celebrates New York, adulting, and friendship, is enshrined in popular culture canon. And Perry’s death—he drowned in his hot tub at his Los Angeles home on 28 October—is a tragic end to this story arc.
The enduring legacy of Friends
Friends began in the age of innocence. It preceded iPhones, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter but transcended technology to amass fans from millennials to Gen Z. The sitcom is its own echo chamber, offering no commentary on world events, political upheavals or cultural phenomena during the time it aired.
Its allure is the promise of friendship and loyalty. It’s there in the chorus, I’ll be there for you when the rain starts to pour. The sitcom won multiple Emmys through the years. More than 52 million people in the United States alone tuned in for the finale.
In India, it is one of the most-watched English-language shows. When it aired in the country around 1999, five years after its US release, it was a novelty for a generation of school and college-going Indians. Friends played to our imagination of the American dream— good-looking and financially independent young men and women who lived a comfortable life without their parents. They didn’t have the answers to life or love, but they had each other.
The Independent’s culture editor Adam White nailed it when he wrote, “…It has held us in its clutches since 1994, and has been passed down through the generations like a sacred text.”
Matthew Perry’s passing brings back memories of late-night binge-watching sessions with college friends, downing tubs of ice cream as we tried to identify with these cool New Yorkers who were aspiring chefs, actors, artists and dinosaur nerds. But it’s also a reality check.
Life is messy, filled with love, loss and longing. And even with friends, privilege and wealth, it can be a tad overwhelming.
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Moving beyond Friends
For Matthew Perry, it was a spiral into pain medication drugs. He reportedly spent more than $9 million fighting for sobriety.
His onscreen avatar, Chandler Bing, was perhaps the most fleshed and least one-dimensional of all the other characters on the show. He clearly had shades of avoidant personality disorder, though his love for Monica helped him overcome that. He was stuck in a job that no one could remember, which he finally quit to start again as an advertising agency intern. And when the season ended, he was firmly enmeshed in the adult world, ready to move to the suburbs and raise his twins with his wife.
Later, he described three years of his time on the sets of Friends as a blur. While millions shed a tear in the finale as the camera panned across Monica’s amazing New York apartment where it all began, and the characters separated to live their life as adults with mortgages and children, Perry claimed he felt nothing. That was in 2004.
He tried to be more than the character that made him famous. He wrote, directed, and produced shows, plays and stand-up comedy. He directed and acted in an episode of the comedy Scrubs (2001-2010). He got a Golden Globe and Emmy nomination for the 2006 movie, The Ron Clark Show. He played writer and producer Matt Albie in Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (2006), which was cancelled after one season. He produced and starred in his play, The End of Longing, in 2016 and 2017, which received mixed reviews.
But he couldn’t escape Friends. Even his addiction memoir could not get rid of it. Titled Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing (2022), it is an unflinching account of fame, fortune and the battle against alcohol and drug abuse. In 2019, his colon exploded, perhaps because of the opiates he was taking. What followed was a two-week coma and 14 surgeries.
In a pre-release interview with The New York Times, he recounted how he got driven back to the de-addiction centre after marrying Monica on the show. “…At the height of my highest point in Friends, the highest point in my career, the iconic moment on the iconic show — in a pickup truck helmed by a sober technician.”
Like The Rembrandts, who sang the Friends theme song, I’ll Be There for You, Matthew Perry was trapped. It’s not that ironic that his last television appearance was as Chandler Bing in Friends: The Reunion (2021). He couldn’t escape Chandler. We did not want him to be anyone else.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)