SPOILER ALERT: The following article contains details about Netflix‘s The One About Matthew Perry docuseries.
Let’s be honest, Netflix’s just debuted is mainly for the hardcore Friends fans. Having said that even the devotees of Rachel, Ross, Monica, Joey, Phoebe and Chandler might be disappointed as there’s not much in this Mary Robertson directed three-part docuseries you haven’t heard before.
Over the approximately three-hour running time, The One About draws on tales of drunken nights, funny faces, and the rise, demands, and bends of fame. There’s interviews with old friends, family members (especially Perry’s younger half-sister and licensed therapist Mia Perry Bowick), NBC Entertainment boss Warren Littlefield, The Whole Nine Yards director and one now ex-U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California. Still, in a rush to get not really anywhere at all, the result is pretty much the officially authorized surface level stuff we all used to get in the 1990s from Behind the Music. Unlike VH1’s sometimes under appreciated Behind the Music, The One About Matthew Perry‘s three-act play of the rise, the fall, and the resurrection never really gains much momentum. The comeback of sorts the third act should promise leaves you feeling at best deceived.
The primary fuel here is the people who love the long time addiction addled Perry, who drowned at the age of 54 in his West L.A. hot tub on October 28, 2023 after taking a ton of ketamine, clearly loved him a lot, and miss him a lot. Yet, The One About (Friends fans get the nod to the successful sitcom) mainly leans on Perry’s best-selling 2022 Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing memoir and its subsequent press tour for its narrative. A decision that, as we know now in hindsight of the book itself, reveals little of the darkness plagued man behind the Friend, if you know what I mean?
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Still, for better and worse, here are some of the highlights of The One About Matthew Perry:
THERE ARE NO FRIENDS: if you are expecting to hear from Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow or David Schwimmer in The One About Matthew Perry, you are going to be very upset.
While the Friends cast are seen though out The One About in behind the scenes footage, clips from the 10-season show, and on press junkets, none of them acquiesced to be interviewed by Robertson. In fact no one from Friends, not the cast, not guest stars, not co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane appear in the docuseries. The closest The One About ever gets to the mega-sitcom is one Jeff Strauss, who was a writer/producer on Season 1 of Friends. While Strauss appears to have been close to Perry initially as Friends came together, most of his subsequent observations and remarks about the actor becoming “challenging and problematic” are clearly second hand at best.
MATTHEW PERRY REALLY WANTED TO BE FAMOUS & THEN REALLY HATED BEING FAMOUS: The son of a journeyman actor and an ex-press secretary to a Canadian PM, Perry was also the step-son of a famous Canadian journalist and later Dateline NBC correspondent. From early days as the class clown to hanging around sets with his father figures and trying to catch a break in early 1990s L.A., Perry, as various pre-fame pals attest in docuseries, wanted to be famous.
When he got there with Friends, on a level barely anyone achieves nowadays, it was overwhelming. To be precise as one can on such occasions, it seems to, from the docuseries and Perry’s own memoir, brought out crippling insecurities, as much as wealth and notoriety. Problem with The One About, unlike Robertson’s much better last Netflix docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, is that is mostly examined though the lens of the spiraling booze, drug and emotional problems with little sense of context — which feels as hollow as canned studio audience laughter.
Also, with that Little Richard attributed quote of “if you don’t want your picture taken, don’t become famous” in mind, the openly ambitious Perry himself is rarely held responsible for his own behavior, actions and addiction. It seems from The One About Matthew Perry that Matthew Perry was a ultimately a perpetual victim who, to quote one of his buddies from the series, “didn’t stand much of a chance” — and that’s just hard to buy.
THERE WAS MORE THAN JUST FRIENDS: The stardom and sprawling legacy of Friends, even though it ended nearly 20 years before Perry’s death, seems to have haunted him in both a Hollywood cliche way and a very real disorienting way until the day he died. Spending decades outrunning Chandler Bing, Perry may have never given himself the ability to let go and find success elsewhere, The One About suggests
While praised for short and Emmy nominated stints on The West Wing, Ally McBeal, and The Good Wife, Perry may have floundered on the big screen but his TV leading roles from 2006 – 2013 displayed untapped talents that never got the time or space to thrive. Looking back from the streaming and revival standpoint of 2026, Perry’s leading roles on Aaron Sorkin’s flawed but prophetic Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Mr. Sunshine (which Perry co-created) and Go On all deserve much more attention, Robertson postulates in the second episode of The One About. There’s not a lot to argue with the Emmy winner’s POV on that — if only Robertson had done those later shows and roles justice.
THE ONE ABOUT DOESN’T HAVE A LOT ABOUT PERRY’S DEATH: I was at court hearings and sentencing hearing on Perry’s death right up until this year. Before that, I was on the story of Perry’s death within an hour or so of his body being discovered in late October 2023 by authorities in his Pacific Palisades home. As more details came out, the sad truth of Perry’s relapses and drug hustle emerged. What also emerged was the fast one the actor played on those around him — pronouncing himself clean and sober when he kept going back to using made his death look inevitable.
Like the cast of Friends, you won’t find a lot of that in The One About Mathew Perry – it doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve constructed, true or not.
One can debate the truth and consequence of Perry’s life and death for ages, I grant you as someone who saw a lot of it unfold close up. Yet, playing primarily on the slop side of the Netflix street, the docuseries doesn’t give you much more time than to take a breath before the epilogue begins.
The One About gives Perry’s death, the investigation and convictions of the scummy doctors, personal assistant and the infamous “Ketamine Queen” just around 15 minutes at the end of the third and final episode. In a summary, bad people did some bad things. While that is partially true, you never learn anything more nuanced about it than that — which makes the almost three hours up to that point feel like a psych out of the viewer and the subjects in the docuseries.
THIS IS WHY PEOPLE SPEND LESS TIME ON NETFLIX: Love it, hate or just eat it, few nowadays are going to tell you fast food is nutritious. Besides a few funny clips from old Friends episodes and some of Perry’s later work, there is nothing good for you or really even memorable about The One About Matthew Perry once you’ve watched all the episodes.
In many ways, the whole series is a juiced up version of Netflix’s recently introduced InstaDocs series and there insta-take on a large event like the OpenAI Hugging Face cyberattack. In another sense, The One About Matthew Perry seems to exist in no small measure to get the streamer’s algorithm to pump you over to more easily digestible programming that you’ll lose interest in fairly quickly.
As a passionate fan of Is It Cake?, dom’t expect me to regal you with highbrow or die recommendations. Good escapism is a treat to me, and a tasty one at that the better it is cooked. However, at the same time, if you want to know Ted and Greg why Netflix subscribers are spending less time on the service, it is air-filled content like The One About Matthew Perry. Content that is truly much ado about nothing.
As Perry himself is heard saying in The One About: “Reality is an acquired taste.”
