The death of Chandler Bing

The death of Friends star Matthew Perry still resonates even after the celebrity news cycle has moved on. Comedy writer James Cary contemplates how endings are written.

James Cary

James is a writer of sit coms for TV and radio.

Actor Matthew Perry looks formally away, with a US flag in the background

A 2012 portrait of Matthew Perry at the launch of a drug control initiative.

Office of National Drug Control Policy, via Wikimedia Commons.

How do you end a sitcom?

That’s not a joke. For those of us who write sitcoms, it’s a practical question. Every episode needs an ending. These days, every season needs an ending. And then the whole thing needs some kind of grand finale as the characters ride off into the sunset.

A sitcom ending should be both surprising but also retrospectively inevitable. That’s what I tell aspiring sitcom writers. The ending of a sitcom shouldn’t be a nasty shock. Nor is it just the moment where the episode runs out of time or story.

Casablanca is one of the all-time great endings. Rick tells Isla to get on that plane, and there’s the business with Lazlo, Strasser and ‘the usual suspects’. I’ve read that the writing of the ending came fairly late in the day. The Motion Picture Production Code forbade showing a woman leaving her husband for another man. This seems restrictive but in our hearts we want to believe that Rick would do the decent thing.

From the very first scene of the very first episode, it was clear that the planets had aligned for this actor, this show and the viewing public. Everybody loved Chandler.

When it comes down to it, our hearts yearn for a happy ending. And if not happy, bittersweet. But mostly sweet.

The ending of Matthew Perry, star of one of the greatest sitcoms of all time, is both surprising and inevitable. No one expected him to die at the age of 54. But given his problems with addiction, it is not as shocking as it might be.

Perry confessed one of his greatest addictions, along with painkillers and alcohol, was to be the funniest. He needed to hear those laughs. In the HBO Max Friends reunion special, he said “To me, I felt like I was going to die if they didn't laugh,” he said. All comedians feel this but it seems that Perry felt it especially acutely. When co-star Matt LeBlanc recalled tripping over his mark and everyone on set laughed, Perry had to jump in. “Because I was like, ‘Somebody's getting a laugh, I can't handle it — I need to get a laugh, too.’”

No wonder Matthew Perry was so funny as Chandler Bing. He was so determined to be the funniest. And he was. From the very first scene of the very first episode, it was clear that the planets had aligned for this actor, this show and the viewing public. Everybody loved Chandler.

For most people, the death of Matthew Perry was the death of Chandler Bing. And we just weren’t prepared for that.

It was a dream character to play: a young man in his twenties who is funny because, well, he is really funny. Being funny is his thing. It’s to cover his cowardice, but he is the funny guy. Ross is the nerd. Joey is the ladies' man. Rachel is the princess. Phoebe is cooky. Monica is uptight. And Chander is the comedian whose lines were being written, rewritten and perfected by a battery of writers who are among the funniest people in the English-speaking world.

But Perry still had to deliver those lines, on cue in the right order, no matter what else was going on in his life. And a lot was going on. But he coped. He was just so funny. The only evidence of his personal demons on screen was his weight loss and weight gain. He was a consistently excellent performer. In an earlier era, when more mainstream romantic comedy movies were made, Perry might have given Cary Grant a run for his money. And then maybe Alfred Hitchcock may have given him a new lease of life.

But I don’t think Perry has been so mourned because of his talent, and that he was taken from us before his time. He wasn’t a River Phoenix or a Heath Ledger whose death meant we have been denied some truly great films they would surely have made. (Personally I feel that way about Victoria Wood who died aged 62 and had at least two more truly great works in her).

For most people, the death of Matthew Perry was the death of Chandler Bing. And we just weren’t prepared for that.

Life isn’t scripted. At least not by us. Sitcoms resemble real life. But our lives are messier, and more complicated. Our jokes aren’t as funny. And sometimes it’s just tragic.

Matthew Perry simply was Chandler from Friends. “I’ve said this for a long time: When I die, I don’t want ‘Friends’ to be the first thing that’s mentioned,” he said. It’s not hard to imagine Chandler making a joke out of that. One can also imagine Perry’s character saying, “I always figured I’d die alone. In a hot tub. Whoa, did I just say that out loud?’ And the audience would laugh because in the Friends-world, those writers have handed Chandler a happy ending: a life with Monica and their children, away from Manhattan, but forever connected to their lifelong friends, Ross, Joey, Phoebe and Rachel.

Life isn’t scripted. At least not by us. Sitcoms resemble real life. But our lives are messier, and more complicated. Our jokes aren’t as funny. And sometimes it’s just tragic. The Chandler Bings don’t get the Monicas and the happily ever afters. Sometimes the Chandler Bings die young and alone. And no-one laughs.

But the real human Perry did what one senses the fictional Chandler Bing would not or could not do: turn to God for help. A year before his death, he wrote in his memoir that at his lowest ebb, he experienced God’s presence and love, saying that “for the first time in my life, I felt OK. I felt safe, taken care of. Decades of struggling with God, and wrestling with life, and sadness, all was being washed away, like a river of pain gone into oblivion.”

Maybe it sounds cliched. But for those of us with a Christian faith, what he experienced is not a surprise but a wonderful reality.

Explainer

Art

Culture

Identity

2 August 2024

5 min read

Controversial art: can the critic love their neighbour?

What to do when confronted with contentious culture.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

Two people run though a darkened art gallery towards a body lying amongst photography paraphanalia

Audrey Tautou and Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code.

Sony Pictures.

In the wake of the controversy over the Olympic opening ceremony, based as it was on a fundamental misunderstanding on the part of Christians as to what was being portrayed, you may be perplexed or confused by the different ways Christians respond to controversial art or media portrayals that are perceived to be an attack on core Christian beliefs. If that is you, here are some thoughts as to why it is that Christians react in a range of different ways.

Our responses are always underpinned by depth of relationship with and commitment to Jesus, the one who has turned our lives upside down and filled us with his Spirit. Our sense of what it is that Jesus has done for us and what it is that relationship with Jesus means to us is the determinative factor affecting our response when we perceive the One we love and who loves us to have been maligned or mocked.

For some, we feel a need to stand with or defend Jesus whenever we perceive that he is under attack, and we have seen that instinctive response apparent in reactions to the Olympic opening ceremony. However, instinctive emotive responses run the risk of pre-empting more reasoned or reflective responses. That has certainly been the case here, as what many Christians perceived to have been a parody of the Last Supper was not actually that at all. Instead, the sequence was a portrayal of the feast of Dionysius, so had nothing to do with the Last Supper at all.

Christians, as here, are often too quick to make allegations of blasphemy without actually understanding what is being portrayed. I have, unfortunately, seen many similar examples within my lifetime. In the 1970’s and 80’s films like Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ resulted in thousands of Christians demonstrating outside cinemas, while Christian organisations, like the National Viewer’s and Listener’s Association headed by Mary Whitehouse, lobbied for those films to be banned.

God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

However, interestingly, the release of The Da Vinci Code in 2006, although it dealt with similarly controversial material for Christians, did not result in mass protests. Instead, through seeker events, bible studies, websites and booklets, churches encouraged discussion of the issues raised by the film while clearly contesting the claims made about Christ and the Church.

The protests against such films often did not tally with the content of the films themselves and displayed a lack of understanding of them, their stories and meaning. As Richard Burridge, a former Dean of King’s College London, has said of Life of Brian, “those who called for the satire to be banned after its release in 1979 were ‘embarrassingly’ ill-informed and missed a major opportunity to promote the Christian message”. Life of Brian portrayed the followers of religions as unthinking and gullible and the response of Christians to that film reinforced that stereotype.

As a result, the Church had to learn again that the way to counter criticism is not to try to ban or censor it but to engage with it, understand it and accurately counter it. The Da Vinci Code events, bible studies, websites and the like that the Church used to counter the claims made in The Da Vinci Code featured reasoned arguments based on a real understanding of the issues raised, making use of genuine historical findings and opinion to counter those claims. These created a conversation with the wider community that was far more constructive than the kind of knee-jerk reactions we have seen to the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games.

Some of these knee-jerk reactions derive from a sense, in the West, that the dominant place Christianity used to have in society has been eroded leading some to think that our values and beliefs are under threat. This reveals an underlying insecurity which it is surprising to find in those who believe that God is all-powerful and in control of human history. God does not need human beings in order to be defended, particularly from perceived mockery.

Indeed, the reverse is the case, as, in Jesus, God deliberately entered human history to experience human life in all its facets, including real mockery and suffering, to show that such experiences are not defining and can be transcended through love and sacrifice. Such a God does not require those who follow to become defensive themselves when the path of mockery is actually the path to resurrection and renewal.

Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life.

So, what might a more constructive and productive response to controversies entail? Taking time to reflect and to understand what it is we are experiencing would be a much better place to start. The Olympic opening ceremony was a celebration of French culture, which highlighted images from the Louvre in particular. Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper’ is in Italy and does not include a blue Dionysius. With some reflection and investigation, that would quickly have become apparent. Similarly, the scene to which Christians objected in The Last Temptation of Christ was just what it said on the tin, the last temptation Jesus faced. It was a temptation that he rejected, and the film was all the more powerful as a depiction of the incarnation as a result.

Then, we can see that what the Christ who embraced human life through the incarnation calls us to is a charitable hermeneutic (how we interpret), when it comes to receiving, understanding and commenting on the culture around us. Cultural comment is as much about love for neighbour as any other aspect of Christian life. Our charitable hermeneutic was summed up for us by St Paul when he wrote of going through life looking for “whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable”. Sister Wendy Beckett, the cultural commentator who most recently has best exemplified this charitable hermeneutic achieving huge popularity as a result, wrote of “a beautiful secret … that makes all things luminous … a precious gift in this confused and violent world”.

With the beautiful secret of a charitable hermeneutic, we might, perhaps, look again at the Olympic opening ceremony and appreciate the intent of Thomas Jolly, the artistic director behind the ceremony, when he said that religious subversion had never been his intention: “We wanted to talk about diversity. Diversity means being together. We wanted to include everyone, as simple as that.”