"Damn. Horrible."
When I clicked on the link, I saw that Matthew Perry, 54, was found dead in the jacuzzi at his home in Los Angeles.
I moaned audibly, got up, and showed the Tweet to Jude. She looked at it, shook her head, and sighed. Just like that, a part of our youth disappeared altogether.
Matthew Perry was the one of the six start of Friends, a sitcom that ran one NBC from 1994 - 2004. 200 episodes in total. The show was about a group of six friends in their mid-twenties, living in New York City, trying to figure out their lives in that awkward, exciting, memorable time in between college and getting married and having kids. That's may take on it, anyway.
Friends was appointment viewing - Thursday nights - on television when that was still a thing. Before streaming. Before Netflix, Paramount +, Hulu, Amazon Prime, etc. In many ways, Friends was the last gasp of network television as people my age remember it.
The stars of Friends became household names - David Schwimmer, Matthew LeBland, Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Anniston, Courteney Cox, and Matthew Perry - and their comings and goings dominated the decade that spanned the late '90's - the first half of the '00's. One of the things that made the show unique was that no one actor or actress starred. Rather, the entire cast was the star and the show, for the most part, revolved around the friends' relationships with each other.
It's funny but I actually missed Friends the first time around. When it debuted in 1994, I had recently graduated from law school and working at a law firm in Nashville. I was 28 years old and the show should have been right in my wheelhouse but, for some reason, it didn't resonate with me. Not then, anyway.
Later, after Jude and got married, though, I started watching the reruns of Friends at night with her. It was something that we did together, before we had children. It was something we shared and bonded over. She had watched and rewatched all of the episodes, so I often asked her questions about something that had happened before or after the episode we were watching, in bed, before we fell asleep each night.
Our lives were different then - more innocent - because we didn't have children. There was a comforting, predictable sameness to our nights. Dinner, often I went for a night run, then Friends before we went to sleep. Or, sometimes, I wandered into the bedroom as Jude was drifting off to sleep and watched part of an episode. Either way, in the early years of our marriage that, now, has spanned more than two decades, Friends often seemed to playing in the background on an endless loop.
Matthew Perry led a troubled life. Jude and I often guessed which season an episode was from by his appearance. If he was exceptionally skinny, it was probably one of the early seasons when he battled a drug addiction and was in and our of alcohol and drug rehabilitation. In later year of the show, he was heavier but somehow seemed happier and more content.
He wrote a reasonably well received memoir last year that covered, in great detail, his history of alcohol and drug abuse. I don't know if alcohol or drugs had anything to do with his death. I'm not sure it matters because it's still so very sad.
As I told Jude last night, I don't think I'll ever watch an episode of Friends quite the same way. The humor will be tinged with a sense of nostalgia and sadness for me. It will be harder, I think, to laugh at the absurdity of some of the storylines or the jokes, without thinking of Matthew Perry's death.
The cast of Friends - the six of them - always seems to enjoy each other's company during the show's run. That's part of what made it resonate with people of a certain age, I think. It seemed like a group of friends that you would like to be a part of or, maybe, that you were a part of in a strange way.
And now, the group of six friends has been reduced to five and the lives of the fans of Friends are a little bit emptier today.
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