The One About Matthew Perry: Netflix Unveils New Doc

You can almost hear the laugh track. That familiar sarcasm — the voice that made Chandler Bing unforgettable — now gets a longer, closer look.

Netflix is releasing a three-part documentary titled The One About Matthew Perry, a name that intentionally echoes the way Friends episodes were titled. It's a small, elegiac nod: many of those sitcom installments began with "The One About...," and here the streaming giant borrows that shorthand to signal something more intimate than a typical celebrity profile.

Directed by Emmy-winner Mary Robertson, the series draws on interviews with people who knew Perry well, including family and longtime friends, and opens the door to private archive footage that has rarely been seen. Expect warmth. Expect wit. Expect the cracks, too.

Perry's career stretched back to 1979 with a first credited turn on 240-Robert. Over the decades he popped up in shows and films as varied as The West Wing, The Good Wife, 17 Again and The Whole Nine Yards. Yet it was Chandler Bing on Friends that made him a household name — a character whose dry one-liners disguised a complicated, sometimes painful interior life.

He died at his home in 2023, a loss that reverberated around the world. Millions mourned the man who had made them laugh and, in many cases, helped them feel less alone. The new documentary aims to map that public persona against the private struggles that Perry spoke about with uncommon bluntness.

His 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, chronicles those struggles in explicit detail: early heavy drinking, years of dependency on alcohol and prescription medication, and long battles with addiction that he described unflinchingly. In the book he recounts heavy drinking from his teens and how substances shaped both his career and his life.

Out of that legacy comes action. After Perry's death, The Matthew Perry Foundation was set up to support people grappling with substance misuse. His sister, Mia Perry Bewick — a psychotherapist, author and speaker — appears in the documentary and has said it took time for the family to be ready to share certain memories. The film promises testimony from those closest to him, voices that aim to show the human being behind the spotlight.

Robertson has said the project is about more than fame or tabloid headlines. She frames it as a chance for friends, family and collaborators to introduce the fuller, messier person who existed beyond the punchlines. That approach seems fitting. Perry was a comic genius; he was also frank about pain and vulnerability. Documentaries that let both truth and tenderness breathe are rare. This one appears to try.

The One About Matthew Perry arrives on Netflix on October 27, 2026 (5 Aban 1405). Whether you came for Chandler's jokes or for Perry's candid, sometimes heartbreaking confessionals, the series looks poised to offer a nuanced portrait: an actor who made millions laugh while wrestling with his own very human demons.

Watch it when it drops, and listen closely. There are parts of his story that still surprise.