Matthew Perry, 1969-2023

Friends premiered on September 22, 1994, when I was 24 years old, approaching 25. It was the 1st TV show that treated my generation as adults, however immature. So to know that the 1st of the main cast to die has gone is a shocking thing... this weekend.

The characters were all roughly the same age, around my age: Monica, who claimed to be 26 late in the show's 1st season and 27 early in the 2nd, and Rachel were best friends growing up on Long Island, making them 2 years older than I was; Ross, Monica's brother, was 2 years older; Ross and Chandler were college roommates; and Joey and Phoebe were around that age, too.

In actual order of age, the 6 main actors were:

* Lisa Kudrow, born July 30, 1963 in Los Angeles. She played Phoebe Buffay, whose unconventional childhood ended at age 14, when the woman she believed was her mother killed herself, and she lived on the street for a while, until she met Monica, and they became friends, and Phoebe became a licensed massage therapist.

* Courteney Cox, born June 15, 1964 in Birmingham, Alabama. She played Monica Geller, a highly competitive chef and neat freak from Long Island, who lived in her grandmother's old (and thus rent-controlled, explaining how she could afford it) apartment in New York City's Greenwich Village.

* David Schwimmer, born November 2, 1966 in Flushing, Queens, the only one who ever actually lived in New York while growing up, but the family moved to the Los Angeles suburb of Beverly Hills, California when he was a boy. He played Ross Geller, Monica's older brother, a nerdy anthropologist. In the pilot episode, we find out that his wife has left him, having fallen in love with a woman. In the 2nd episode, we find out that his wife is pregnant, and their son Ben is born near the end of Season 1.

* Matt LeBlanc, born July 25, 1967 in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. He played Joey Tribbiani, a womanizer and an aspiring actor. Joey wasn't always dumb: He seems surprisingly insightful in the series' pilot. Unfortunately, as with the other characters, he went on to become more and more of a parody of himself: By Season 5 -- and it went 10 seasons, probably more through inertia than anything else -- the show seemed like a 7-minute Saturday Night Live sketch that now ran 22 minutes (30 minus commercials).

* Jennifer Aniston, born February 11, 1969 in Los Angeles, daughter of actors John Aniston and Nancy Dow. She played Rachel Green, a spoiled Jewish-American Princess (JAP) who left her would-be husband at the altar, and was cut off by her father when she decided to forge her own life, rooming with once-and-again best friend Monica. She became a waitress at the gang's favorite hangout, a coffee bar named Central Perk, and eventually achieved her dream of becoming an executive in the fashion industry.

* Matthew Langford Perry, born August 19, 1969 in Williamstown, in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, but grew up in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, Ontario. He played Chandler Bing, a neurotic child of divorced parents, who used humor as a defense mechanism, and had an office job that was hard to define. He also had an odd way of speaking: "Could that report be any later?" "The hills are alive with the sound... of music!"

Left to right: Perry, Aniston, Schwimmer, Cox, LeBlanc, Kudrow

Yesterday, Perry was found dead in the hot tub of his home in the Pacific Palisades section of Los Angeles. He was 54 years old -- 4 months older than me.

One of the six had to be the first to go. Accidents and sudden illnesses happen, so it wouldn't have been out of the ordinary for that to have happened sooner. And, given his admission of past substance abuse, I'm not surprised that he's the first. But it's still a shock, especially how.

Richard Moll, who played the enormous bailiff Bull Shannon on Night Court, died earlier in the day. He was 80. Now, most of the actors of that show are gone. Someone online pointed out how 1980s sitcom stars are dying. I told him to compare it to the beloved sitcoms of earlier generations, and he'd see that, at roughly the same point in their histories, those shows lost people at around the same rate.

Now, 54 is not a kid. It's not like there was some tragic accident while the show was still on the air. But it's not 80, either. At least he got to publish his memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing; and to open Perry House, a rehab center in his former mansion in Malibu, California.

He got to write his life's next chapter. Sadly, it turned out to be its final chapter.