‘The One About Matthew Perry’ Review: Netflix Docuseries

Perhaps it’s most helpful to begin a discussion of Netflix‘s three-part The One About Matthew Perry with an acknowledgment of the things that it is not.

Directed by Mary Robertson (Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV), The One About Matthew Perry is not a salacious documentary about Perry’s death and the subsequent criminal investigations. Peacock already did one of those, and if you skipped it, you’re better off.

The One About Matthew Perry also isn’t a definitive celebration of the life and comic genius of Matthew Perry, as related by those who worked with him most closely.

That is to say, it’s not a documentary designed to spawn “10 Fun Things We Learned From…” listicles and — despite the pandering title, with its borrowing of Friends episodic nomenclature — it’s only a documentary about Matthew Perry and his hit NBC sitcom insofar as you can’t tell Perry’s story without reciting nostalgic talking points about Friends. Even if it might be better if you could.

Literally none of Perry’s Friends co-stars appear in the documentary — nope, not even Janice or Gunther — nor do any of the key creative forces from the show. Unless you count Warren Littlefield, NBC’s entertainment president at the time, as a creative force from the show. Otherwise, one writer from the first season (Jeff Strauss) is included, but nobody with a high enough profile is there to say anything that might be interpreted as sensational or sensationalistic.

The same is roughly true of the rest of the A-listers whom Perry worked with over the years. Fools Rush In is represented by producer Doug Draizin, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip (and Mr. Sunshine) by Nate Torrence, The Whole Nine Yards by director Jonathan Lynn.

I can’t say whether or not Robertson reached out to the various big names in Perry’s celebrity sphere, but it’s my instinct both that she did not and that none of them would have agreed to participate anyway. The bigger the names you get, the more the focus of the documentary becomes what Lisa Kudrow or David Schwimmer or Aaron Sorkin have to say about Matthew Perry, rather than Matthew Perry.

Plus, the truth is that The One About Matthew Perry almost isn’t about Matthew Perry at all, which I don’t really mean as a criticism, though it will leave some viewers disappointed. Yes, it contains a lot of the biographical details and memorable clips that you expect from a documentary about Perry. But The One About Matthew Perry might have been better if it had skipped the basics entirely, because it treats that stuff in a manner that feels perfunctory rather than even remotely inspired. It surely would have been more sharply focused.

What, then, is The One About Matthew Perry? It’s a sincere, generally non-exploitative examination of addiction and celebrity — but not from Perry’s perspective, since Perry wrote a bestselling memoir that covered all of that. Instead, it’s about addiction and celebrity as viewed from slightly outside the celebrity bubble.

If Robertson had been able to trim The One About Matthew Perry down to a 100-minute feature-length doc that didn’t find the basics so necessary to include, it probably would have been a better project. I’m not sure I learned anything at all about Perry here, but the documentary’s heart is with the people still struggling with what they did or didn’t know and what they could or couldn’t do when it came to Perry’s life and death.

Sure, it would be flashier if Netflix could boast that it had reunited the surviving cast of Friends, but most of The One About Matthew Perry is recounted by people you don’t know, starting with Mia Perry Bowick, Perry’s younger sister. Matthew Perry was 14 when she was born, and she did much of her growing up with an already famous sibling. The latter fact adds poignancy to her decision to become a psychotherapist, inspired by watching Matthew’s decades of struggles. Her memories of learning about Matthew’s first rehab stint from a tabloid headline, or of the day of her brother’s death, are heartbreaking — and not the sort of thing that will get aggregated in entertainment news stories. That’s why they cut through.

The same is true of the recollections shared by Roger Castillo and David Pressman, friends going back to Perry’s earliest days struggling as an actor in Hollywood. I don’t know if Robertson reached out to Hank Azaria, part of the same group that hung out at Formosa Cafe and in various cheap Hollywood apartments. But again, it’s savvier to present this chapter of Perry’s life without the distraction of big names.

Perry dated plenty of famous women, but the ex-girlfriends featured in the documentary aren’t the Lizzy Caplans or the Julia Robertses, but rather the René Ashtons and the Romes — women who knew Perry intimately but can speak without added distraction. (Actually, this stuff is already close to distracting. Ashton, in particularly, gives the impression that she’s trying to add sizzle to a documentary that doesn’t need it, but I’m glad she and Perry had sex on a private plane.)

Instead of offering viewers a line-up of flashy tributes, Robertson wants viewers to come away thinking of Tim Harrington, who met Perry in recovery and ended up living at Perry’s house for a year; or West Huddleston, who worked with Perry on drug court advocacy campaigns.

The thing viewers are supposed to take away from The One About Matthew Perry isn’t really that it’s hard to become famous and discover that fame (and $7 million) can’t cure the pernicious demons of addiction, but that it’s hard to do everything you can for a person and love them as best you’re able and still not be able to do enough. It’s hard to watch and painful to listen to, but Robertson handles the documentary’s key moments with subtlety and intimacy.

There’s so much good stuff in The One About Matthew Perry that it’s unfortunate how often it’s lost underneath so much less interesting stuff. With all the people telling Perry stories that have never been heard before, do we really need the talk-show footage of Perry telling stories he told repeatedly? Probably not. Does Littlefield add anything that he didn’t say in his own book and that hasn’t been said in various documentaries about Friends? No. Are the general platitudes about Perry’s talent and why Friends was successful — courtesy of a single cultural critic — really necessary? Maybe in principle, because you don’t want to just approach Perry in terms of his tragic end. But there had to be better ways of approaching the familiar side of things.

There’s an original and insightful feature-length documentary that could have been chiseled out from under all the generic padding here. You can’t have the former without the latter, apparently.