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Before the premiere of Friends, Matthew Perry was making a solid living as a kind of junior HITG!, recognizable from his guest roles on the likes of Growing Pains and Beverly Hills, 90210 and supporting turns in teen movies like She's Out of Control and A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. At the tender age of twenty-one, he even had one failed sitcom under his belt -- the Valerie Bertinelli vehicle Sydney.
Confronted by the pilot script for Friends, Perry may have thought it would be Sydney all over again -- an assemblage of toothsome twentysomethings in the service of a marginally famous brunette (in the case of Friends, Courteney Cox). It's certainly probable that no one predicted the massive hit Friends would become -- least of all NBC, which débuted it on Thursdays at 8:30 PM. (Mind you, this is before NBC's Thursday at 8:30 time slot had become a dumping ground for the likes of Union Square, Jesse, Daddio, The Weber Show, and Inside Schwartz, to name but a few of the lowlights.) But Friends prospered, moving to the plum post-Seinfeld slot midway through its first season, and subsequently landing at 8 PM, where it has remained ever since, anchoring NBC's Must See TV and becoming the #1 sitcom for a streak that takes us to the present day.
In the show's first season, David Schwimmer's Ross was positioned as the show's male romantic lead -- the sad clown with the broken marriage and the lesbian ex-wife, pining after Rachel, trying to ward off his loneliness with that funny, scene-stealing monkey. But most of my female friends were more taken with Perry's Chandler. We recognized Perry as Carol's dead boyfriend from Growing Pains, and the kid who wrote that terrible screenplay and tried to kill himself in the first season of 90210; we remembered that even in those rather pedestrian roles, he seemed to have a wry, snarky quality -- tempered just enough with self-deprecation that he didn't come off as a smug bastard. Chandler got all the best lines and didn't bore us with the topography of his tortured emotional landscape, unlike Ross. Back then -- in the first two seasons of the show, anyway -- Chandler was the male Friend to beat.
After the first few years, though, Chandler evolved into the male Friend you want to beat, and kick, and whose coat you want to pull over his head before leaving him toothless and bloody in the gutter outside Central Perk. (Or perhaps it's just me?) Chandler as Mrs. Monica is one of the most loathsome, craven characters in television history (once again, in my opinion). You see, success on a TV show means repetition: if it works, you do it over, and over, and over again. (Why do you think Ross has been married so many times?) You make sure your character stays pretty much the same through one-night stands and stealing his friend's girlfriend and getting handcuffed to an office chair and sleeping with a platonic female friend and then fighting with her (constantly) and putting up with her shrieking neuroticism and proposing to her and marrying her until your every line seems to scream the subtext, "Could I be more whipped -- and predictable?" You keep falling back on the proven schtick until the audience gets sick of you -- or until you get sick of yourself.
My theory is that Matthew Perry got sick of himself a few years earlier than his co-stars. Perhaps his despondency and/or boredom at playing Chandler for the past eight years (and counting, now that it's been confirmed that the show will be back for another season) is part of the reason for his recurring drug-dependency problems and yo-yoing weight over the past few years. Of course, like all the other Friends, Perry has sought to mix it up artistically in non-Friends roles...but in every one of his movies, he's still playing Chandler. Fools Rush In is basically "What would happen if Chandler knocked up a fiery Latina?" Three to Tango is premised on the joke that's the subtext of dozens of Friends episodes, namely, "People think Chandler's gay, but he's not!" The Whole Nine Yards boils down to "Chandler runs afoul of a hit man," and Almost Heroes is "Historical Chandler + Fat Guy = An Alan Smithee Film." So much for stretching as an artist.
However, not being one of Perry's intimates, nor privy to his inner life, we can only speculate as to whether he really is sick of himself. We are more qualified to address the question of whether the public is sick of him -- and, therefore, whether his level of fame is artificially inflated. Although, because Perry's fame is intimately linked with -- and entirely the result of -- the unflagging success of Friends, that's hard to determine. If the show is doing well ratings-wise, does it necessarily follow that Perry is doing well fame-wise? Should it? Does it really affect Perry's level of fame if he works on a film that never comes out because he has to go to rehab in the middle of filming (Serving Sara, I'm looking in your direction)? Should it?
It's very difficult to examine a TV star's fame independent from the show for whom he is famous. A side effect of the repetition described above -- coming to an audience, in other words, every week for years and years, playing the same character -- is that your own name will be obliterated and replaced by that of your character. Neil Patrick Harris, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Ed Asner will always be Doogie Howser, Buffy, and Lou Grant (respectively) to their fans. Similarly, most of the people who know and love Matthew Perry probably identify him not as "Matthew Perry," but as "Chandler." (Most of the people who know and hate Matthew Perry, on the other hand, probably have myriad unkind nicknames for him.)
Since we find it difficult at this late stage in the game to divorce Matthew Perry's fortunes from those of Friends as a series, we will say this: we hope Matthew Perry is wisely investing the $24 million he will earn for his final season of Friends, or else calling KFC every few weeks to see if they've cast a replacement for Jason Alexander for their TV spots yet. Of all the Friends, Matthew Perry is the one who has apparently grown the least as an actor, and who has demonstrably taken the fewest risks (yes, even fewer than Matt LeBlanc, who at least had the sense to get himself cast against type in Charlie's Angels). As such, Matthew Perry will have the hardest time eking out a post-Friends career identity; as soon as the show goes off the air, his career is going to sink like a stone, taking his fame with it.
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