“G od, you can do whatever you want to me, just please make me famous.” So prayed Matthew Perry when he was a young unknown actor auditioning in LA, enjoying the partying and the friendships but struggling to find work. Many have offered up such a fervent wish, of course; few have had both sides of it fulfilled in such a spectacular way as the man who became part of one of the most successful sitcoms in television history and who died after relapsing into drug addiction in 2023 at the age of just 54.

The three-part, three-hour documentary – titled, perhaps inevitably, The One About Matthew Perry – charts the whole of the actor’s rise and fall. It is an exhaustive but never (quite) exhausting film. Three hours is a long time, for sure, to tell what is in essence a sad but very simple tale, and some tiny trims could undoubtedly have been made, but it avoids tedium because of the quality of the interviews and the interviewees.…