In 1994 I lived in a tiny sublet in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York, on a beautifully curving and tree-lined street.
My apartment was south-facing which, coming from Melbourne, dismayed me in anticipation of cold grey, sunless days. It was only when I moved in that I realised on the other side of the planet south was the new north.
I was studying communications at New York University, living off a generously-given but fast dwindling scholarship. My whole apartment was the size of your kitchen, with a hissing steam heater that the building supervisor switched on in October and off in March.
It was on the second floor of 19 Grove St and faced a splendid corner building with a scene from Rear Window in every room. Nobody ever drew their blinds and while I couldn't afford the installation of cable TV, the unfolding narratives visible from each window provided endless entertainment on many snow-bound nights.
As fall turned to winter, tour groups started appearing on the street below, gesturing towards my apartment block and the one opposite, and I had no clue why (gentle reader, I could do no quick search — the "information super-highway" had just been invented: I'd been given a brand new .edu email address at NYU which I was yet to use as I knew nobody else who had one. That address must still be out there, somewhere).
It wasn't until I returned to Australia after a year in that city and turned on the TV to watch a smash new show called Friends that I realised the exterior shot of Ross's apartment was my building, and the now-famous, implausibly large apartment of Rachel and Monica was the Alfred Hitchcock building opposite.
I had unwittingly been living in the middle of one of the biggest cultural moments of modern television history and been too technologically impoverished to know what was going on.
Rolling Stones vs The Beatles, Friends vs Seinfeld?
I don't know who decided that the world must be divided into those who love the Rolling Stones or the Beatles, those who love Seinfeld or Friends, but while I'm defiantly with the Stones in the former face-off, I back Friends all the way in the latter and to this day will rarely flick past a stumbled-upon repeat, and even less rarely will not know almost every line.
The brilliance of the show is contained in its title. Plot is simply the by-product of great characters being set loose as themselves, and unlike almost any other TV show of that time, the writing and characterisation of those six people was distinctive and distinctly different, one to the other.
Think of a line spoken by Monica, or Joey or Ross: now try to imagine that line being said by any other character in the show. It's impossible. The words belong only in their mouths. I don't think you could apply that rule to the characters of any other sitcom of its time, and particularly not those of Seinfeld, whose shared, universal awfulness was the whole schtick.
Like billions of others, I loved Friends. It turned out those characters were almost exactly the same age as me, making the struggle into the working world via a series of McJobs and failed relationships. And like many other women like me with ambitions to become quick, clever and fulfilled, and then find a bloke just as quick and clever — my favourite character was of course Chandler.
I suspect the creators of the show, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, knew very well that particular appeal of their smart, funny guy. Girls like me liked the funny ones. In an alternative-reality episode, Chandler was a writer with the New Yorker magazine — wise-cracking and confident, sexually suave in the way his usual narrative reality never allowed him — and that was only as it should have been.
His sarcastic impatience became a catchphrase for my ABC Melbourne Mornings team as we chased the clock each day in search of a program.
Chandler was the role Perry was born for
Matthew Perry wrote emphatically in his searing memoir about reading for Chandler and knowing with total desperation that this was the role he was born to play. By the time the cameras rolled on the final 10th season, it was impossible to tell the actor and the character apart.
Perry was a deceptively transparent comedic actor. He had a lightness of touch, was easy with physical gags, and transmitted mischievous joy with just an eyebrow or an upper lip. And yet when he was ordained into the Aaron Sorkin universe in two of that creator's great works — Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The West Wing — he found a powerful stillness in the drama he was asked to play and could hold a room with just his physical presence.
I loved his Republican lawyer character, Joe Quincy, in the West Wing, and the delicious combination of Sorkin's rapid-fire dialogue and Perry's ease with its demands. Sorkin did however miss an opportunity for a Hepburn-Grant type romance between CJ Cregg and Quincy, another alternate reality I'll always regret.
I was hoping for a redemption arc
I've been ineffably sad ever since the awful news of Matthew Perry's death. The first fatal rupture within an iconic cultural group — a band, an acting ensemble — is the true death of the group itself: any future work or reunions now impossible. Their achievements as a creative unit now live only in the past (unless you're The Beatles and refuse to live by mortality's usual rules).
But mostly I've been sad because after reading his book I was hoping for a redemption arc for Perry himself, for that extraordinary comic wit to come alive again somehow, to find someone to write new great material for him this late in life — sober, clean and healthy.
It wasn't my wish to make, of course, but after losing so many of my cultural idols in recent years to booze and pills and the ravages of addiction I wasn't up for losing one more.
This weekend the girl next door, the older dad and the return of those Beatles… I'll say it: does the world really need another maudlin dirge about John's weirdly enmeshed relationship? Do The Beatles and their heirs really need the acclaim, the money? Discuss … while I hide behind the couch.
Have a safe and happy weekend and I don't know about you but I'm running out of great TV dramas to stream: got any suggestions? You can tag me on Insta if you have.
I'm dreading the end of this new season of Morning Wars which has come back after a ludicrous season two with a breathless dive into a post-Roe v Wade America.
This 2021 Sarah Cothran cover of Matt Maltese's brilliant solar flare of a song made an unexpected appearance in a recent episode, and I loved hearing it again. You should turn it up.
Go well.