I was most of the way through a full Friends rewatch when the doc-series The One About Matthew Perry debuted for those with a Netflix subscription, and I was on the fence about watching it. I wasn't sure I was up for a deeper dive into the actor's substance abuse struggles amidst conjuring fond memories of one of my favorite series. Friends is one of my comfort shows, and I knew this new docuseries was going to have the opposite effect, as it'd be a heartbreaking reminder of the tragic ending that befell Perry in 2023 -- his death was ultimately ruled an accident, with ketamine use among the contributing factors.
Still, I felt compelled to watch the Netflix docuseries, and yes, it was uncomfortable and sad and a lot of other things, but there's one thing that really hit me hard about the story that's told across three episodes, and that's just how hard Matthew Perry struggled with his addiction. When I say struggled, I don't just mean that the docuseries focused heavily on his substance abuse, I mean that it emphasized and helped me understand how he battled with that addiction for years.
I admit, I didn't follow the actor's personal life particularly closely in the years during or after Friends aired. It was still public knowledge that Perry had trouble with addiction over the years, and that he'd been to rehab. What The One About Matthew Perry really made clear to me, through the use of interviews from his sister (Mia Perry Bowick) and other people who knew him at some point in his life, was how hard he tried to get and stay sober in the decades before he died, including a lot of time and money spent on rehabilitation treatment.
From the accounts of friends and loved ones, we learn more about his trips to rehab and efforts to stay clean afterward, while also building a career for himself as an entertainer. It's a fascinating look at the different dimensions of the comedic actor, and I very much appreciated that the goal seemed to be to help viewers understand him better (as opposed to making a spectacle of his life).
My understanding of drug addiction and alcoholism is admittedly pretty limited. A lot of what I know about the most extreme cases comes from the media (news, movies/TV shows), which I think is a big reason why my perception of it probably isn't very balanced. So much of the focus of substance abuse, as I've seen it, is on the harm it causes -- for the person and the people around them -- and that's important. But the struggle many go through over years or even decades to get and stay clean is something I want to understand better. Maybe I'll never fully understand how difficult sobriety is, having not struggled with addiction myself, but I want to understand it as best I can.
Matthew Perry's experience trying repeatedly to get his addiction in check and his life and career on track is illustrated vividly in The One With Matthew Perry. There's more to the docuseries -- including some humor, the relationships he had with friends and family, his time on Friends, and his goals within his career and as a person -- but the growth he was trying to achieve over the years is really what struck me most. It left me wanting to read (or listen to) his memoir, so I can learn even more about what he went through, this time from his own perspective.
