Yahoo News “Like When a Beatle Dies”: Hollywood Unpacks Why Matthew Perry’s Loss Feels So Massive
I watched Friends when it originally aired. I was in college in the 1990s, when the sitcom launched and became a cultural phenomenon. I carved Thursday nights out of my calendar, reserving the 8 p.m. hour for my Friends obsession, refusing to go out until after my weekly visit with Ross, Rachel, Monica, Chandler, Joey and Phoebe. I was experiencing many of the same things my Friends were: first love, first job and learning who I was — a little OCD (Monica), deflecting (Chandler) and a dash responsible dork (Ross).
Needless to say, Matthew Perry’s passing has been as emotional a blow for me, as it has for so many others. I remember when Kurt Cobain died and felt the impact of Magic Johnson’s revelation that he was HIV positive. Neither came close to mirroring how I feel now after Perry’s tragic death Saturday at age 54.
The love for Perry transcends generations and travels the globe. His journey as Chandler continues to resonate both for viewers who came of age when the NBC hit originally aired its 10 seasons from 1994-2004 and who have discovered the series on streaming.
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His passing feels “like when a Beatle dies,” offers Warren Littlefield, the former NBC honcho who greenlit Friends.
At its height, Littlefield recalls, Friends would get as many as 50 million people watching an episode live on Thursday nights, with north of 75 million tuning in to NBC’s “Must-See TV” lineup — roughly a third of the country. “You didn’t want to go to work the next day and be at the watercooler or coffeemaker if you weren’t ready to participate in the collective experience and recount it the next day. That will never be found again,” Littlefield tells THR. “Teenagers today have no idea this existed on a network called NBC. Multiple generations have come to discover the show and claim that it’s theirs, an indication that Friends uniquely stands the test of time. There aren’t many TV shows that can accomplish that.”
Friends, like I Love Lucy and M*A*S*H before it, was a unicorn — a series that speaks not just to the generation who watched it when it originally aired but also to those who came later who discovered the show in syndication (thank you, Nick at Nite, TV Land, TBS) and to those who will continue to connect with Chandler and company via streaming, first on Netflix and now on Max. Actresses and baseball players alike learned English from watching the show.
“It truly is one of the biggest TV shows that was ever made in terms of popularity not only here but everywhere,” says Robert Greenblatt, the former WarnerMedia executive and NBC president who spearheaded the 2021 Friends Reunion that was originally designed to help launch what is now Max.
“When I moved to get HBO Max off the ground, one of the foundations of the service was going to be Friends and one of first things I and others started asking was if we could ever get [all six] back in any form. We started to talk to the creators, Marta Kauffman, David Crane and Kevin Bright, and everyone wanted to do it. This was October 2019. We went to Courteney Cox’s house in Malibu to sit with the actors and convince them to do it — but Matthew wasn’t there either, ironically. There were always questions about his health and if he was comfortable being on camera. But they said he wanted to do it.”
As for Friends‘ deep emotional impact, Greenblatt puts it simply: “You felt like they were your friends, in your living room. That’s what TV does: It can be close to you and you feel like you know those people. It’s powerful when that happens, and when one of them is taken away, it’s a cultural loss.”
When Friends ended in May 2004, about 80 percent of millennials, Gen Xers and baby boomers knew who Matthew Perry was, and his positive Q Score — a measure of how well regarded a celebrity or brand is — was “off the charts,” says Q Scores executive vp Henry Schafer. “His score was in the 30s. The average celebrity score is about 16.”
Although none of Perry’s subsequent work (including NBC’s Go On, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and CBS’ The Odd Couple reboot) approached the supernova success of Friends — few things have — he was still warmly regarded by his audience, Schafer said. The actor’s Q Score fell off some in later years, as is typical for celebs if they don’t appear in a string of blockbusters. But “for people who followed the show in its original run, he had an undying base of loyalty,” Schafer notes.
Friends was never not a hit, ranking among Nielsen’s 10 most watched series every season it was on and never averaging less than 20 million viewers over a season (a rare enough space even in the broadcast-centric 1990s and pretty much unheard of today). The show’s most watched episode, 1996’s “The One After the Superbowl,” drew almost 53 million viewers — the biggest audience for a post-Super Bowl show since total viewers started being regularly tracked in the early 1980s. The hourlong installment gave most of the cast a showcase moment, but Perry’s scenes opposite Julia Roberts — playing a former classmate who exacts revenge for a grade school prank — are arguably the most memorable.
Being in front of that many people week after week for a decade, and countless more in syndication and on streaming in the two decades since Friends ended, bred familiarity but never contempt for Perry or Chandler. Despite common critiques — the unrealistically big apartments and mostly monochromatic New York the characters moved through — Friends’ secret sauce was the fact that a group of people trying to grow up and figure out their place in the world is a pretty universal story.
“One of the things that we really worked hard to do with that cast was make it really believable that these people were actual friends and had this history together and had chemistry that you couldn’t just manufacture,” says David Janollari, the former Warner Bros. TV head of comedy who developed the series and helped to cast Perry as Chandler. “Not only was Matthew a really great guy, he was genuinely funny. They don’t come that funny naturally that often. He was doing a scripted show and was, in real life, that sharp and that funny. He clearly brought so much of his own personality and sense of humor to Chandler.”
Chandler, who had a boring, undefined job, tough relationships with his parents and a spotty romantic life (at least early on) — and, like a true Gen Xer, employed sarcasm as a shield — was maybe the most relatable of all six of the main characters. Audiences loved the character for that and Perry for making Chandler a caring person underneath all that armor.
For Sony Pictures Television president Katherine Pope, who worked with Perry on Studio 60 during her time as a comedy development exec at NBC, Perry’s Chandler represented what Friends is at its core: an aspirational coming-of-age story. “Each character has their own version of it and his version is one of, ‘How do I come to love myself and recognize that I deserve to be loved?’ It’s so devastating because that was Matthew’s journey in life. The most human comedy is comedy of pain, where there’s a real dramatic underpinning to it,” says Pope. “Of all the actors on Friends, he had, in many ways, the most underpinning of pain and pathos and humanity. And that pathos came through so much that Chandler is most people’s favorite on the show.”
For Karey Burke, the president of 20th Television who previously worked in comedy development and was with Janollari, Littlefield and few others in the room for the pitch that ultimately became Friends, Perry’s Chandler embodied the everyman of the show as his relationship with Monica replaced Ross and Rachel as the show’s central love story. “That’s the fantasy: You fall in love with your best friend, who knows you for all your flaws and weaknesses. That’s why it was so captivating,” she tells THR. “The whole show was a universal experience. She was the everywoman and the magic of that storyline was so brilliant.”
Janollari says he “once got Matthew and Marta [Kaufman] in a room and wanted to do a show based on his life story,” says the former development exec, who remained friends and frequently played wallyball (volleyball on in a racquetball court) with Perry in the decades after he left Warner Bros. TV. “We all wanted to do something set in rehab but with a purpose to it. It never came together. But I think he wound up doing it in book form.”
“Friends was one of last big pop-culture shared experiences,” says Pope. “This feels like the end of an era. It gave you a sense of shared experience and how to connect with people. It’s harder to feel that bond now.” With an estimated 600 scripted shows in the U.S. last year, Pope says viewers today don’t feel the same way about characters as they did with Friends. “I used to see this all the time, when you watched a show every week, you felt like you welcomed those people into your house. People would call them by their character name and walk up to them, ‘Hey Chandler.’”
Burke, like Pope, has kids who have become Friends obsessives. Ages 19 and 25, they bought flowers and placed them at the West Village location where the Friends exterior apartment scenes were filmed. Her father, too, fell in love with the show during its original run and after asking to come watch a taping, wound up becoming a background extra in a scene at Central Perk in season one.
“It’s not just a generation — Matthew impacted many generations around the world. He was ours,” says Burke. “We all felt like we knew them because of the ubiquity of their presence in our lives.”
Rick Porter contributed to this report.
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