The golden age of sitcoms died with Matthew Perry

The most surprising thing about Matthew Perry’s death at 54 was how surprising it felt. I gasped out loud when I read the headline, even though his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, was just inches away on my bedside table.

“It is very odd to live in a world where if you died, it would shock people but surprise no one,” he writes in chapter one. But we were surprised. When I read it last year I hoped the book was a sign he’d found his happy ending. But as I reread it in the hours after his death, it began to read more like a long goodbye.

That first evening after he died, I did what I have done for the past 30 years whenever I needed some easy, guaranteed cheer: I watched Friends. But now it just makes me sad. Oh, Chandler Bing. You weren’t just on the show of a generation — you were the character of a generation, with your sarcasm, self-deprecation and corporate burnout. Did you have to carry that to its natural conclusion and be struck by the illness of a generation: an addiction to opioids?

No fictional character better captured late Gen Xers and early millennials than Chandler. And not since Wayne and Garth from Wayne’s World has one character so influenced how young people talk and tell jokes. All those sarcastic asides and overemphases were reduced to shtick by their instant ubiquity (“Could you be more of a millennial cliché?”), which makes it easy to overlook how original and talented Perry was to have coined it all in the first place.

On top of that, no sitcom since has had anything like the cultural impact that Friends did. Perry’s death marks the end of the golden era of sitcoms, when Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Frasier and Friends attained global recognition of a kind that The Inbetweeners and The Big Bang Theory can only dream of. Multiple generations have grown up watching Friends — and still do. What other weekly sitcom, other than The Simpsons, can make such a claim?

As universally recognisable as Perry was, however, his death is not the same as when Prince or Michael Jackson died, because he was not an untouchable icon like them, their deaths signifying the end of artistic greatness. Instead it has felt more akin to when Amy Winehouse died in 2009: like her, he wore his addictions heavily, and his fans felt a protective kinship with him because he showed us his all-too-visible struggles.

Prince also died from an opioid overdose, and Jackson was hooked on painkillers, but they hid their addictions. Perry, with astonishing courage, talked publicly about his addiction to opioids and how his fame gave him access to more of them in a way no high-profile person had done before. What Rock Hudson did for Aids — destigmatising the illness by being one of the first celebrities to acknowledge publicly he had it — Perry did for opioid addiction.

When a celebrity suddenly dies, it’s a shock. But when a celebrity wastes away in public — as Karen Carpenter did, and Winehouse, and Perry — there is a different kind of sadness, because we know all too well how unhappy they were. Chandler, Perry writes in the memoir, used jokes to hide his pain, a tic Perry shared, and even the bleakest moments in his book are leavened with wisecracks. When he describes the time his colon exploded, due to severe constipation caused by his gargantuan opioid consumption, he adds: “I was so full of shit it almost killed me.”

It is not hard to imagine his reaction to his own death, found in his hot tub: “Could you be more of a celebrity cliché?” Chandler was conceived as a secondary character, the one who would just watch the others and make a wisecrack. “But everyone ended up liking Chandler so much that he morphed into being his own major character,” Perry writes. We liked him because Perry showed us Chandler’s vulnerability through the cracks of his humour, just as we could see Perry’s frailty, his weight ballooning and shrinking on the show. The more he tried to hide from himself, the more clearly he showed his pain.

On the terrible 2021 Friends reunion, the other five actors looked as glossy and unknowable as ever, whereas Perry shuffled in with a bad beard and clothes that looked fresh from a dumpster. The contrast between his seemingly effortless comedic skills and his obvious inability to live was confusing, then shocking, and finally heart-breaking. He knew exactly how self-destructive and lonely he was. He kept telling us, but we didn’t want to believe it. Maybe because Chandler was still, decades later, making us laugh, and that obscured the present reality. Well, now we believe it.

Comedies We’ve Grown Up and Old With...

Seinfeld

1989-98, 9 series, 180 shows
One of the most influential sitcoms, Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David’s New York-set show about life and messy love lives echoed strongly throughout Friends. It made Seinfeld the richest comedian in the world. Netflix paid a reported $500 million for the rights in 2019.

The Simpsons

1989-, 35 series, 754 shows
Matt Groening’s frantic family became essential teatime viewing on BBC2 in the 1990s. They spoke for a slacker generation, riled a president (George HW Bush) and were a huge selling point for Disney+ when it was launched in 2020.

Frasier

1993-2004; 2023-, 11 series, 264 shows
If Friends is about people you wanted to sleep with, Frasier is a sitcom that makes viewers feel smarter. Kelsey Grammer is a constant force; John Mahoney as his dad is one of the most deceptively tender, best-drawn characters of the decade. This year’s reboot has, so far, not diminished the legacy.

Friends

1994-2004, 10 series, 236 shows
Available on Netflix in the UK, this decade-defining sitcom has become a default watch for kids born long after the show ended. Its simplicity is why it resonates – the actors still make $20 million a year from the show.

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What’s your favourite Chandler Bing moment in the series Friends? Let us know in the comments below