Every night, I fall asleep to Friends. I don't even need to watch it any more. The voices are enough. I know people who revisit all ten seasons once a year, almost like an annual pilgrimage to a place that doesn't exist. For me, it has become something closer to a parallel world, somewhere I can return without having to explain myself. I know the geography of Monica's apartment, the rhythm of the conversations, the familiar interruptions and the jokes before they arrive. Time behaves differently there. Relationships collapse and recover, people lose their jobs, make terrible decisions, fall in and out of love, yet somehow everything remains reassuringly intact. Outside, our lives continue. We lose people, change homes, grow older and become strangers to earlier versions of ourselves. Inside Friends, the door of Central Perk is always open. I used to think this attachment was peculiar, perhaps even slightly embarrassing. Then I discovered that I was far from alone. In 2019, British GQ interviewed 30 people who watched Friends almost every night, many of whom described its characters as a kind of surrogate family. The Guardian has explored the same extraordinary attachment, with viewers describing the series as somewhere that feels like home. Even psychologists have investigated this phenomenon. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that favourite television programmes can provide a sense of belonging and help counter feelings of loneliness. Researchers call it social surrogacy, but that clinical expression barely captures the experience. Millions of people, alone in different bedrooms, living entirely different lives, appear to be returning to the same six people in the same New York apartment. Almost as though we have collectively discovered a place that exists somewhere beyond our own reality.
Then I watched Sam Esmail's Leave the World Behind, and something clicked. As civilisation appears to collapse, a young girl becomes increasingly desperate to finish watching Friends. Surrounded by an unfolding catastrophe, she eventually discovers a bunker containing the final episode. She sits down, presses play and abandons the apocalypse outside. The film ends with the familiar theme tune, an extraordinary moment in which the fictional world seems to acknowledge the audience watching it. We have spent two hours contemplating the fragility of civilisation, only to discover that someone facing its possible extinction wants exactly what millions of us want at the end of an exhausting day: to return to Friends. It would be easy to dismiss her behaviour as denial, but perhaps the scene reveals something more interesting. She knows perfectly well that the people on the screen aren't real. She simply chooses, for a moment, to inhabit a world where the future is already written. We often discuss nostalgia as a longing for the past, but Friends offers something more peculiar. It allows us to visit a past that never belonged to us in the first place. Its New York is not really New York, its friendships are not quite ordinary friendships, and its version of the 1990s has been preserved without the complications of history. It is an imaginary memory that millions of people somehow share.
Netflix's The One About Matthew Perry, released on 27 October, returns us to that decade through the life of the man who played Chandler Bing. Directed by Mary Robertson, the three-part documentary draws on the recollections of his family and friends, alongside photographs and private recordings that capture a different era. Much of the archival material carries the unmistakable texture of 1990s home video, the imperfect resolution, the colours, the strange intimacy of footage recorded before every moment was destined for an audience. There is something almost physical about encountering those images today. They remind us of how the world looked when we were living in it, when the future was still unknown and the people smiling into those cameras had their entire lives ahead of them. The documentary does not need to explain when the 1990s ended. They ended at different moments for different people, and perhaps part of their fascination is that we never quite agreed on what replaced them. Watching those recordings feels like discovering an old doorway into a time we thought we had already mourned. And Matthew Perry's death in October 2023 becomes another of those moments when a piece of that world disappears. Yet unlike the archival footage, which reminds us that the past is irretrievable, Friends remains permanently available. Chandler is still waiting in the apartment, apparently unaware that anything has happened.
Perhaps this is why Perry's death has made the experience of returning to Friends more intimate rather than less. He is no longer alive in our world, but within the series he is still speaking, laughing, arguing with Joey and sitting beside Monica. The distinction between actor and character remains obvious, yet the emotional boundary becomes strangely difficult to maintain. We know Chandler is fictional. We also know that the man delivering those lines was real, that he stood on those sets, spoke those words and experienced those fleeting moments thirty years ago. Before Perry died, we could watch Friends without giving much thought to that separation. Now every appearance contains two realities: the character who will never die and the actor who already has. For viewers who have made Friends part of their daily lives, this creates a peculiar form of closeness. We aren't simply remembering Matthew Perry. We are encountering a recorded fragment of his life unfolding in front of us. The laughter is familiar, but we hear it differently. A gesture or an ordinary expression acquires an intimacy it didn't previously possess. And while Perry appeared in many other productions, Friends is the place where that encounter feels most natural, because it is somewhere we have been visiting for years. His death has made the fictional world feel more real, not because we have forgotten it is fiction, but because we have become more conscious of the actual human life preserved within it.
The documentary reveals the suffering that existed beyond the reassuring boundaries of that fictional universe. Perry's addiction, his attempts at recovery and the complexities of his relationships belonged to a life that could never be resolved with a joke before the closing credits. His family and friends describe someone far more complicated than either Chandler Bing or the tragic figure constructed by the headlines. Their memories also remind us that the 1990s were never the uncomplicated paradise nostalgia sometimes makes them appear. People were struggling then, just as they are now, even when the photographs suggested otherwise. But perhaps that is what makes the relationship between Perry and Friends so extraordinary. The documentary brings us into contact with the world outside the sitcom, where time moved forward and left consequences. The series offers us the possibility of returning to a moment before those consequences became visible. On 28 October, three years after Perry's death, the contrast feels particularly acute. His friends and family can remember him, and audiences can revisit his many performances, but that apartment in New York has become a uniquely familiar place to encounter him again. Tonight, when I turn off the lights, I'll hear Chandler's voice coming through the darkness. I already know what he's going to say. But I think I'll listen a little more closely.