Keanu Reeves is not in the new Matthew Perry documentary on Netflix, but halfway through watching it, I couldn’t help but think of him and of that regrettable situation with Perry’s 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. In it, Perry was musing about young movie stars who died of substance abuse problems, saying, “Why is it that the original thinkers like River Phoenix and Heath Ledger die, but Keanu Reeves still walks among us?” Perry immediately regretted it, apologized and struck the words from later editions. 

But watching The One About Matthew Perry, a three-part docuseries about the Friends star who died at 54 of a ketamine overdose, it’s actually a quote from Reeves that resonates. In 2019, he answered a late-night talk show question, “What happens when we die?” with a deceptively simple and completely authentic answer (coming from his own experience with loss): “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.”

And that is, more than anything else, at the heart of The One About Matthew Perry, which features the actor’s sister Mia Perry Bowick, three of his closest friends, and a myriad of former colleagues, ex-girlfriends and one-time AA connections who all viscerally miss this person they loved and fought for unconditionally, even though – as his friend and fellow actor Kevin Pollak says – “he just wasn’t that good at fighting for himself.” Here’s what you need to know about the series.

Who made the documentary? Mary Robertson is a U.S. filmmaker who’s been nominated for three Emmys for her work on Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, Controlling Britney Spears and Framing Britney Spears. She also executive produced The Fall of Diddy.

Are new details of Perry’s life uncovered? There are cute stories, like the convertible Mustang he gave his sister for Christmas when she was 15, and how he would quote the not-famous lines from A Few Good Men to his friend Pollak, who’d been in the movie. There’s also insight into his comic inspirations – he idolized Chevy Chase and Dick Van Dyke – but mostly Perry thoroughly covered his own life in his memoir. What is new is the different takes on what happened to him in the last year of his life, the details of the funeral and how those around him felt about the criminal case associated with Perry’s death. 

Does the Friends cast appear? No, the most famous faces are Pollak and former NBC exec Warren Littlefield, who greenlit Friends. Of course, there are tons of photos and videos, clips from the show and archival interview footage of the cast – and there’s a very touching story about them at the funeral. But they declined to participate, and Robertson said she understood that they were grieving.

Should you watch it? It is a chance to hear Perry tell his story in his own words and voice, stitched together from in-depth interviews he did over his life. But the docuseries is sad – really sad, dark and depressing. The first episode has lots of footage of a young and sweet Perry, whose sarcastic charm and vulnerability made him, and by extension Chandler, many people’s favourite Friend. But episodes 2 and 3 are pure pain, with a brief interlude around 2022 when he wrote the book and had seemingly found peace and happiness in helping others struggling with addiction. But that lasted less than a year before his death in October of 2023. Bottom line: proceed with caution and emotional fortitude.