Mia Perry Bowick had never talked about her brother on camera. In The One About Matthew Perry, a three-part documentary series for Netflix, she is the voice the whole story rests on, and the five actors who spent ten seasons beside him on Friends are nowhere in it. Mary Robertson, the Emmy-winning director of Quiet on Set, has built her portrait of the man who played Chandler Bing out of the people who knew him when the cameras were off.

The trailer starts with Perry himself. In voiceover he recalls a bargain he once offered: “I said God, you can do anything you want to me just please make me famous.” The fame came, and so, he says, did the rest: “God did not forget the other part.” In another old interview he describes the letdown in plain words: “I was extremely happy when I got famous. Then I was like, uh-oh, this didn’t fix what’s inside me.” His sister answers with a figure. “My brother would talk about that feeling of emptiness or loneliness that he couldn’t quite fill,” she says. “He spent $7 million trying to get sober. That’s how seriously he took his disease.”

That number has already become the headline of the trailer’s coverage. It is the least interesting thing about the series. The decision that shapes this documentary is who Robertson put in front of the camera, and who she did not.

A documentary cast like a witness list

Start with the people who knew Perry before anyone else did. Bowick, a licensed psychotherapist, speaks about him on camera for the first time, and Netflix says the series draws on unreleased photos and home videos from the family’s private archive. Roger Castillo, a friend of more than 40 years, drove Perry to his Friends audition. David Pressman, another close friend, also gives his first on-camera account. Several former girlfriends take part.

Then the working life, which the series extends well beyond Central Perk. Warren Littlefield, the former NBC president, and Jeff Strauss, a writer on the sitcom’s first season, tell the story of the audition and of how Chandler Bing was put together. Kevin Pollak, a friend and frequent co-star, sits down alongside Jonathan Lynn, who directed Perry in The Whole Nine Yards, and Doug Draizin, a producer of Fools Rush In. Participants also discuss Boys Will Be Boys, the early sitcom, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The End of Longing, the play Perry wrote and starred in.

The third group is the one most celebrity documentaries leave in the margins. Tim Harrington met Perry at a recovery meeting in 2001, later lived with him as a roommate, and credits the actor with saving his life. Evelyn Sallinger also met him in recovery. West Huddleston worked with Perry on drug court advocacy, the treatment-over-prison cause the actor championed in public long after most people had stopped asking him about Chandler.

And then there is E. Martin Estrada, the former U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution in the criminal case connected to Perry’s death. His office charged five people, two of them doctors, over the supply of the ketamine. His presence suggests what kind of series this is. A tribute can stop at the memory. A documentary that interviews the prosecutor has signalled that it intends to walk the viewer to the end of the story, through the part the tabloids covered and the family lived.

The chair that stays empty

Rolling Stone reported that none of Perry’s Friends co-stars took part. Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer released a joint statement after his death and sat with him for the 2021 reunion special, but they are not interviewed here. Netflix has not explained why, and the documentary does not owe an explanation.

The absence sharpens the title. Every Friends episode was named “The One With…” or “The One Where…”, and Netflix borrows that grammar for a series the show’s cast chose to stay out of. The Friends audience will come looking for Chandler. The people on screen knew the man who went home after the taping, and the series seems built to keep those two figures in the same frame without letting either one erase the other.

Perry had already told his own version. His 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, was unusually blunt about his addiction, and in interviews around it he said he hoped that, when he died, helping people get sober would be mentioned before Friends. The series is what happens when other people take that account and add their side of it: the sister who watched it from the family table, the friend who drove him to the audition, the roommate from the recovery years, the prosecutor who built the case around his death.

Why Mary Robertson

Robertson’s work has a clear method. As showrunner of The New York Times Presents she oversaw Framing Britney Spears and Controlling Britney Spears, the films that shifted the public conversation around a conservatorship. With Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV she gathered former child actors and crew members to describe what happened behind a children’s network’s biggest hits. She was also an executive producer on The Fall of Diddy. In each case the argument comes from the order and weight of the testimony, not from a narrator telling the viewer what to think.

Her statement about this series points the same way. “Matthew Perry was one of the comedic geniuses of our time,” she said. “He also gave us so much more by bravely speaking about addiction. Yet the public only knew part of his story.” Bowick framed it in more personal terms, saying she wanted people to see him “as a whole person, not just as Chandler, and not just as someone who struggled with addiction.” Read together, the two statements describe the same job from two sides: the filmmaker wants the missing part of the story, the sister wants the missing part of the man.

Whether the finished episodes hold that balance is something only the full series can show. The ingredients point to a family archive on one side and a federal case file on the other, and the open question is whether they can describe the same man without one of them taking over the picture.

When and where to watch The One About Matthew Perry

All three episodes of The One About Matthew Perry premiere globally on Netflix on Tuesday, October 27, 2026. Each runs about 50 minutes. The release falls one day before the third anniversary of Perry’s death: he died on October 28, 2023, at 54, from the acute effects of ketamine. Mary Robertson directs and executive produces with Lisa Kalikow, Eli Holzman and Aaron Saidman; Lora Moftah is co-executive producer and Jessica Call producer, for Maxine Productions, part of Sony Pictures Television.

The One About Matthew Perry: quick answers

Is The One About Matthew Perry a true story? Yes. It is a documentary series built on interviews with Perry’s family, friends and collaborators, plus archive interviews with Perry himself and unreleased family photos and videos.

Are the Friends cast in it? No. None of his five Friends co-stars took part. Friends collaborators Warren Littlefield and Jeff Strauss do appear.

How many episodes are there? Three, each around 50 minutes, all released on the same day.