Linked List: October 29, 2023

Sunday, 29 October 2023

‘Matthew Perry Was the Sarcastic Soul of “Friends”’ 

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Rolling Stone:

There’s not a lot of Matthew Perry in the pilot episode of Friends, but he gets to deliver one of its funniest jokes. As the gang sits around Central Perk, a newly-divorced Ross admits that he just wants to be married again. A second later, Rachel wanders into the coffee shop, soaking wet and wearing a wedding dress. Without missing a beat, Perry’s Chandler Bing declares, “And I just want a million dollars!”

Like a lot of Chandler punchlines, it’s quick and biting in its sarcasm. And like a lot of Chandler punchlines, Perry’s delivery elevates it from a smartass quip that a few dozen actors could say into something you can’t imagine leaving anyone else’s mouth.

Note the timing and the emphasis of the thing. The pause after “And I,” the way he hits the “I” as hard as he does, and the way his voice goes full game show host as he says “million dollars,” all combine to give the gag a musicality beyond what Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane wrote on the page. It’s a small moment in an episode that is primarily concerned with characters who are not Chandler Bing. But you watch it and you want to hear him say things like it, again and again and again.

Perry was so great on Friends, but my favorite show he was on was the short-lived Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a 2006 Aaron Sorkin show that I’ve always thought failed in part* because it was a few years ahead of its time. Its lone 22-episode season aired on NBC. It was too smart, too cinematic, for network TV. It should have been on a cable channel like HBO, or, if it aired a decade later, a streaming service. The show was so good (at times — 22 episodes was way too many for a show striving for such quality), and Perry was sublime.

Perry, too, deserves accolades for his remarkable openness regarding his long struggle with addiction, and his heartfelt willingness to help anyone and everyone else with The Problem. Rest in peace.

* I don’t know if it hurt Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, but another weird thing about it was that it debuted the same year, on the same network, as Tina Fey’s hall-of-fame-funny sitcom 30 Rock. Both shows shared the same fundamental premise: they were about fictionalized versions of Saturday Night Live. They even both had numbers in their titles, and those numbers were oddly similar. Studio 60 was a funny drama, and 30 Rock a sitcom’s sitcom, but I always wondered if it was a bad idea to launch two roman a clefs about SNL at the same time.

‘Matthew Perry Made It Look Easy’ 

Alexis Soloski, writing for The New York Times:

A confession: When I received a news alert that the actor Matthew Perry had died, my mind adopted the particular cadence that Perry perfected as Chandler Bing, the character he played for 10 seasons on the NBC sitcom Friends. Here is what I thought, “Could this be any sadder?”

Perry, 54, died nearly a year after the publication of Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, an unusually candid memoir of addiction and recovery. As he detailed in that book, he spent many of the best years of his career oblivious, avoidant, numb — conditions that don’t typically encourage great acting. But he was great. And it had seemed reasonable, if rose-colored, to hope that sobriety might make him better, returning him to the nervy, instinctive brilliance of his peak years. That hope is now foreclosed. [...]

To say that he never did anything quite as good as Friends, before or after, is not to diminish his achievement. Even among the irrepressible talents of his co-stars, Perry stood out, for a rubbery, heedless way with physical comedy and a split-second timing that most stopwatches would envy. If you have seen more than a few episodes of the show — and many, many millions have, including fans born years after its initial airing — you will have absorbed Chandler’s rhythms, his catchphrases, the way Perry’s handsome, moony face would stretch like spandex, the better to sell a reaction. He had both an absolute commitment to what a line required and a way of gently ironizing that line. His character was the butt of jokes. Perry was in on those same jokes. There was a boyishness to him that seemed to excuse his characters’ worst behavior, on Friends and in subsequent roles.