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.

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16 July 2024

6 min read

Tech has changed: it’s no longer natural or neutral

The first in a three-part series exploring the implications of technology.

James Lawrence

James is Canon Missioner at Blackburn Cathedral. He researches technology and theology at Oxford University.

A caveman holding a hammer looks at a bench on which are a broken bicycle and a laptop.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

My son was born in February last year and it seems that every day he is developing new skills or facial expressions and adorable quirks. Just the other day he was playing with some wooden blocks and when they inevitably fell over, he let out the most adorable giggle. As you can guess I immediately reached for my phone so that I could capture the moment. Moments like this happen all the time in the life of a modern parent- we want to share with our spouse, family, and friends or just capture the moment for ourselves because it’s something we treasure. And yet, in this series of articles I would like to consider this moment, and the thousands like it that take place in a technological society, and ask: is everything as benign as it seems?

There are two ideas that often come up whenever people talk about technology. The first is that technology is basically ‘neutral’, that technology only becomes good or bad depending on what you are doing with it. “Look at a hammer,” someone might say, “there is nothing intrinsically good or bad about this hammer, only the end result is good or bad depending on whether I’m using it to hit nails or people!” On this reading of technology, the only important questions relate to the consequences of use.

If technology is neutral, then the primary concern for users, legislators and technologists is the consequences of technology, and not the technology itself. The only way to ensure that the technology is used for good is to ensure, somehow, that more good people will use the technology for good things than bad people using it for bad things. Often this idea will present itself as a conversation about competing freedoms: very few people (with some important exceptions, see this article from Ezra Klein) are debating whether there is something intrinsically problematic about the app formerly known as Twitter, most discussion revolves around how to maintain the freedom of good users while curtailing the freedom of bad users.

We assume that these tools of social interaction like Facebook and Instagram are, in and of themselves, perfectly benign. We are encouraged to think this by massive corporations who have a vested interest in maintaining our use of their platforms, and at first glance, they seem completely harmless: what could possibly be the problem with a website in which grandma can share photos of her cat? And while the dark underbelly of these platforms has violent real-world consequences – like the rise of antisemitism and anti-Muslim hatred – the solution is primarily imagined as a matter of dealing with ‘bad actors’ rather than anything intrinsically problematic with the platforms themselves.

Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools.

The second idea is related but somewhat different: Advocates of modern technology will suggest that humanity has been using technology ever since there were humans and therefore all this modern technology is not really anything to worry about. “Yes, modern technology looks scary,” someone might say, “but it’s really nothing to worry about, humans have been using tools since the Stone Age don’t you know!” This view proposes that because hammers are technology, and all technology is the same, there is, therefore, no difference between a hammer and the internet, or between the internet and a cyborg.

This second idea tends to be accompanied by an emphasis on the slow and steady evolution of technology and by highlighting the fact that at every major technological advancement there have been naysayers decrying the latest innovation. (Even Plato was suspicious of writing when that was invented). Taken as part of a very long view of human history, the technological innovations of the last 100 years seem to be a normal and natural part of the evolution of our species which has always set itself apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in its use of technology.

Steve Jobs gives a good example of this in an interview he gave about the development PC:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condors used the least energy to move a kilometer. And humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list… not too proud of a showing for the crown of creation… But then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And a human on a bicycle blew the condor away – completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me… It’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with… It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds”

Notice that Jobs here draws a straight-line comparison between the bicycle and the PC. As far as Jobs is concerned, there is no quantitative difference in kind between the two tools: one is more complex than the other but otherwise, they are just technologies that expand human capacity. “A Bicycle for our minds” is a fascinating way to describe a computer because it implies that nothing about our minds will be changed, they’ll just be a little bit faster.

And yet, despite the attempts of thought leaders like Jobs to convince us that modern technology is entirely benign, many of us are left with a natural suspicion that there is more going on. As a priest in the Church of England, I often have conversations with parishioners and members of the public who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed at some point (fairly recently) about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives. That modern technology is not simply the natural extension of the sorts of tools that humans have been using since the Stone Age and that modern technology is not neutral but in significant ways has already had an effect regardless of how we might use it. How do we respond to such articulate and thoughtful people such as Steve Jobs who make a compelling case that modern technology is neutral and natural?

I often have conversations with parishioners who are looking for language or a framework which describes the instinctive recognition that something has changed about the nature of the technology that we use, or the way that it influences our lives.

Thinking back to that moment with my son when he giggles and I take a photo of him, at first glance it seems completely innocuous. But what resources are available if I did want to think more carefully about that moment (and the many like it) which suffuse my daily life? Thankfully there is a growing body of literature from philosophers and theologians who are thinking about the impact of modern technology on the human condition. In the next two articles I would like to introduce the work of Martin Heidegger, outline his criticism of modern technology, showing how he challenges the idea that technology is simply a natural extension of human capacity or a neutral tool.

Heidegger is a complex character in philosophy and in Western history. There is no getting around the fact that he was a supporter of the Nazi Party during the second world war. His politics have been widely condemned and rightly so, nevertheless, his insights on the nature of modern technology continue to this day to provide insights that are useful. His claim is that modern technology essentially and inevitably changes our relationship with the world in which we live and even with ourselves. It is this claim, and Heidegger’s suggested solution, that I will unpack in the next two articles.