Article

Addiction

Culture

Film & TV

14 November 2023

5 min read

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 Cary is a writer of situation comedy for BBC TV (Miranda, Bluestone 42) and Radio (Think the Unthinkable, Hut 33).

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.

Article

Assisted dying

Culture

Politics

4 October 2024

5 min read

Assisted dying and the cult of kindness

I witnessed an assisted death. We need to be honest in the debate about it.

Matthew Hall

Matthew is an author and screenwriter.

A tableau shows minature figures of two people, one sitting on a life size syringe and the other stands

Etactics Inc on Unsplash.

The Assisted Dying Bill is likely to be passed into law this autumn, the government having promised to ‘rush it through’. The debate will invariably be conducted in a fog of euphemistic language in which ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ will feature heavily on both sides, while the main point is likely to be missed: the legalisation of euthanasia or AD, marks a tectonic shift from a Christian to a post-Christian society and should be a wake-up moment for dozing Christians.

I was recently present when my aunt, an artist who had become a Canadian citizen, died by euthanasia in her own home while in the very early stages of motor neurone disease. She was 72, divorced, living independently, fully mobile (although she had lost the use of one arm) and was laughing and joking up to the moments before the doctor (or ‘The Killer’ as her son called him) injected the first dose of the lethal cocktail. It happened at 7pm on a Tuesday evening. She had made the phone call requesting her death at 3pm the previous Sunday – yes, a Sunday. Service of a kind our NHS can only dream of.

As a reluctant witness to what I consider a murder-suicide, I was nevertheless beguiled by the relatively clean ending (although there was some disturbing gurgling that apparently occurs as a result of the lungs filling with fluid) to a life that was about to become very difficult. Her two older siblings, including my mother, are each currently several years into slow deaths from combined Parkinson’s and dementia.

I am an almost daily visitor and a secondary carer to my mother, and while she is mute, benign and seemingly contented, the toll on my stepfather and on me is enormous. I often pray for it all to be over – it’s an endless grind and her former self would be utterly horrified to see herself this way! – and yet, as a Christian, I have to see purpose in it. One thing it certainly does do, is force carers to be selfless and compassionate in the strict sense of the word, which is ‘to suffer with’.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible.

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My aunt didn’t want the trial of becoming ill and dependent, and the Canadian government gave her an opt-out which she grabbed the instant she received her diagnosis. Confirmation by two doctors that she was terminally ill and of sound mind – almost a trifling formality – got her immediate approval. She was, to use her kind of language, ‘out of here’ a mere three months later.

How could she have been so cavalier and determined to die, despite the protests of her son, nephew and granddaughters? She was, in hindsight, a perfectly minted product of the 1960s who believed above all in doing her own thing - whatever felt right. Such notions were anathema to her Christian parents and their dutiful wartime generation but are now the norm.

Like many who came of age to the sound of the Beatles, she toured the spiritual supermarket and picked out the nice bits from Christian, pagan and Eastern religions – predominantly those that allow you to think that life is about ‘being in tune’ or feeling good about yourself. This did most definitely not include becoming immobile and having strangers change her nappy. She believed in an afterlife, ‘love’, aliens and reincarnation but definitely not in judgement or consequences for her suicide.

Her decision to die was the ultimate consumer choice – she availed herself of a service that promised to free her from her ailing body as quickly and comfortably as possible, with the added bonus of leaving her assets to her family.

The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge.

Polls in Canada and the UK show that the vast majority would consider this a win all round. According to Opinium, 75 per cent of British adults support AD. In political terms this a ‘bridge issue’ almost without comparison, uniting 78 per cent of Conservatives with 77 per cent of Labour supporters, yet no issue should more starkly dramatise the unbridgeable chasm between Christian and secular world views.

The sharpness of this divide has, however, been successfully obscured by the insidious (and to my mind, diabolical) Cult of Kindness that has inveigled itself into both secular and Christian space. Imitating Christian virtues, it subverts them by subtly perverting language - by using ‘compassion’ when what is meant is ‘convenience’, for example – and by making ‘happiness’ rather than self-sacrifice the highest good. This leads both sides into dishonesty and self-delusion.

The biggest pro-AD lie is that it is merely an escape route for the tiny few facing the most intolerable suffering with no additional consequences. The truth, as the Canadian experience demonstrates, is that AD is not a slippery slope but a cliff edge. It is now the fifth most common cause of death and climbing by 30 per cent each year. Every seriously ill Canadian now feels some pressure to address the option. Cases of people choosing AD out of despair, depression or at the suggestion of a lazy or uncaring State official are already numerous. Those who have signed an advance consent waiver setting a date for their euthanasia in the event of their mentally incapacity, are now being terminated. In some cases, the demented refuse to cooperate and are euthanised under forced sedation. The State is already saving money and families are saving their inheritances. Life itself has been downgraded.

The Christian side indulges in even bigger untruths. Windy episcopal speeches about advances in palliative care avoid the hard fact that denying AD involves many suffering prolonged and painful deaths while family finances are destroyed and carers worn down to a husk. The pill can’t be sugared: thou shalt not kill is absolute, not an invitation for an ethical discussion. The point is so fundamental that to avoid it and be drawn into discussing the minutiae of legislation is a betrayal of the faith.

Christians won’t save the secular world from AD and its consequences, but the current debate is an opportunity for honesty and for Christians to save themselves from the delusion that the true virtue of compassion can be inverted to justify killing.

The Christian religion began with an agonising death of a kind which its scriptures exhorts its followers not to fear. It’s a tough message: God doesn’t promise the comfort we would like in this life. We do have the means and the duty to alleviate much suffering, but death as a consumer choice is simply off the table.