Matthew Perry’s 2022 autobiography Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was billed as two things: an addiction memoir and a behind-the-scenes glimpse at one of the most popular TV sitcoms of all time. I didn’t read it when it was released (I’ve never read a single ‘celebrity memoir’) but picked it up at a thrift store recently as Perry once again dominates the headlines due to the ongoing trials of those who supplied the ketamine that killed him last October. I don’t recommend it—it is profane and not particularly well written, although it does effectively convey something of the profound despair addicts of Perry’s calibre experience.
What struck me, however, was not the sparse celebrity anecdotes or Perry’s interminable rehab stays. One of the least remarked on revelations of Perry’s memoir is the fact that he lived the lifestyle promoted by Friends to the hilt, and it was one of his greatest regrets. He was rich and famous and leveraged that—as most celebrities do—to live a wildly promiscuous lifestyle. Yet Perry doesn’t really boast about his sexual antics. Instead, he writes time and again that if he could go back and do it all over, he would have gotten married and had children instead. He is remarkably candid about how many wonderful potential life partners he spurned in exchange for cheap sexual encounters and how lonely that had made him:
In a life riddled with mistakes, this may have been my biggest one. And mistakes are hard to undo. During that time, I met at least five women that I could have married, had children with. Had I done so just once, I would not now be sitting in a huge house, overlooking the ocean, with no one to share it with, save a sober companion, a nurse, and a gardener twice a week…
Perry writes about one of his ex-girlfriends calling him to tell him she had become a mother. He had dumped her after she became attached to him during what he insisted was a casual sexual relationship. After he hung up the phone, he “lurched to a stop on the verge” of the Pacific Coast Highway:
The sun was still high, the surfers were up on their boards, but I was utterly thunderstruck with emotion. The giant wave everyone was looking for was happening in my head.
“She could have had that child with me,” I said, to no one, as I sobbed like a newborn myself. I was so sad and alone. I cried for about forty-five minutes … It behooved me to wonder why I’d broken down so hard. I sat there, wondering and wondering, until I finally realized … what I [had] been doing: I’d been looking for an hour or two of pleasure with every woman ever invented when there was so much of life I was missing.
Considering his regrets, it is a sad irony that Perry catapulted to fame starring in a show that did more to mainstream the Sexual Revolution than any other. Friends deliberately pushed the envelope on a host of social issues, normalizing same-sex ‘marriage,’ surrogacy, pornography addiction, and cross-dressing, wrapped carefully in comedy and showcased by brilliant, attractive actors. But it was casual hookups and predatory sexual behavior that made up the core of the show. Over the ten-season run, NBC’s flagship sitcom portrayed the six friends having a total of 85 sexual partners without ever contracting an STD or getting an abortion—and it was all portrayed as innocent, normal fun.
As the playboy Joey Tribbiani, played as a dumb, lapsed Catholic by Matt LeBlanc, put it while scoping out his next target: “She’s needy, she’s vulnerable—I’m thinking cha-ching!” Women with ‘daddy issues’—that is, deeply wounded by divorce and fueled by consequent father hunger—were portrayed as particularly easy marks, much like an animal might be drawn to already-injured prey. Sex is portrayed as both an all-consuming passion and fundamentally frivolous. Perry, by his own admission, had lived like this in real life. He insisted on a ‘no strings attached’ approach to intimacy, cheated on his partners, and promptly abandoned women if they showed signs of developing genuine feelings for him.
More than any previous sitcom, Friends normalized this hookup culture. As Jasmine Lee wrote for Screen Prism, “Friends showcases sex as just a natural act in which two consenting adults participate. Sex doesn’t change the world, doesn’t lock two people into a ‘til-death-do-us-part commitment, and doesn’t require much more than ‘Yeah, s/he’s cute, I’m interested in his/her sexy bits, let’s get it on.’ Considering this was a primetime television show, this is a fabulous piece of normalizing presentation.” Or as cultural analyst Samantha Allen observed, the most enduring cultural legacy of Friends was its mainstreaming of casual sex; the show, she noted, broke TV taboos and gave viewers “a decade-long crash course in sex education.”
As Sebastian Morello has written, that ‘education’ didn’t work out well for those who received it.
Decades later, after much experience of sexual degradation, superficial (virtual, even) ‘friendships,’ captivity by addiction, economic disparity, rising debt, and family breakdown, the attempt to conform our world to the liberal sitcom has left us jaded. Friends-educated millennials are generally more at home in virtual reality (or, unreality) than reality, they struggle to make prudent professional decisions, are alarmingly entitled, and have extremely unstable friendship groups and sex lives. Millennials haven’t just been unable to get the large apartments next to Central Park, they won’t even get mortgages in the whole course of their lives. Trapped inside the comedy, they’ve discovered it’s nothing like its portrayal on the television, and it’s definitely not funny.
But it didn’t even work well for most of the actors who earned a million bucks an episode to sell it to us, either. Jennifer Aniston has mourned that she wishes someone told her to freeze her eggs during that period, as she now desperately wants to have children but has realized that it is no longer possible. Courtney Cox, David Schwimmer, and Matt LeBlanc have all been divorced. Only Lisa Kudrow sustained a long-term relationship—she will be married 30 years next year. Not incidentally, Kudrow rejected the Friends lifestyle and stated in one interview that she remained a virgin until getting married. “For me it was just, ‘No, I’m saving myself because I have to make myself worthy of the kind of man I have in mind,’” she told an interviewer.
