Netflix's Matthew Perry documentary arrives as the criminal case over his death closes

Netflix on Tuesday released "The One About Matthew Perry," a three-part documentary series built from new interviews with the actor's sister and some fifteen friends and collaborators, arriving one day before the third anniversary of his death. The series lands after a federal criminal case over the drug that killed him has run its full course, with the fifth and final defendant sentenced in May.

The documentary, directed by Emmy winner Mary Robertson and produced by her Maxine Productions banner under Sony Pictures Television, is described by Netflix as the first in-depth documentary made about Perry since his death. According to the official announcement on Netflix's Tudum site, the three TV-MA-rated episodes trace Perry's path from a teenage tennis prospect turned comedy actor to his years on "Friends," his advocacy for addiction treatment, and his death from the acute effects of ketamine on October 28, 2023, at age 54.

Perry was born August 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and was 24 when he was cast as Chandler Bing in a pilot originally titled "Six of One," soon renamed "Friends." The sitcom ran on NBC from 1994 to 2004 and made its six leads among the highest-paid actors in television history. Perry earned an Emmy nomination for the role in 2002 and later received nominations for guest appearances on "The West Wing" and for the television film "The Ron Clark Story," which also brought him a Golden Globe nomination. After "Friends" ended, he continued to work steadily in film and television, including the sitcoms "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," "Go On" and "The Odd Couple," and reunited with his five co-stars for the 2021 special "Friends: The Reunion," which drew a further Emmy nomination.

A documentary built on family testimony

The series is anchored by Mia Perry Bowick, Perry's sister and a licensed psychotherapist, along with longtime friends including actor David Pressman, comedian and actor Kevin Pollak, former NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield, "Friends" writer and producer Jeff Strauss, and former U.S. Attorney E. Martin Estrada, who led the federal prosecution connected to Perry's death. None of Perry's five "Friends" co-stars — Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc and David Schwimmer — appear in interviews; Netflix has said they appear only in archival footage, and it has not disclosed whether they were approached.

Robertson said she set out to make a film "for those who love Matthew — which, by the way, is kind of everyone — to love him more," according to the Tudum account of the project. Bowick, in the same announcement, called working on the series with Robertson's team "cathartic."

"We know the cast of Friends loves Matthew and are grieving in their own ways," Robertson said of the show's approach to the sitcom co-stars who sit out the interviews.

The series draws on previously unreleased photographs and home video from the Perry family's private archive, material Netflix says has not been shown publicly before. It also revisits Perry's history of addiction, which he wrote about at length in his 2022 memoir, "Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing," including his statements in interviews around the book's release that he had entered rehab roughly fifteen times and spent close to $9 million trying to get sober over three decades.

The criminal case that frames the series

The documentary premieres with the federal prosecution over Perry's death fully resolved. In August 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California announced charges against five people accused of supplying Perry with ketamine in the weeks before he died, including two doctors, his personal assistant, an acquaintance who acted as a middleman, and Jasveen Sangha, a North Hollywood woman prosecutors called the "Ketamine Queen."

All five eventually pleaded guilty, and sentencing concluded this spring. Sangha, who admitted selling Perry 25 vials of ketamine for $6,000 four days before his death, received the stiffest term: 15 years in federal prison, handed down in April by U.S. District Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett, according to the Justice Department's announcement of her sentence. Dr. Salvador Plasencia, who injected Perry with ketamine he obtained from a second physician, was sentenced to 30 months. That physician, Dr. Mark Chavez, received eight months of home detention. Erik Fleming, who passed ketamine from Sangha to Perry's assistant, was sentenced to 24 months. Kenneth Iwamasa, Perry's live-in personal assistant, who admitted injecting Perry with ketamine on the day he died, was sentenced last, to three years and five months, closing out the case in late May.

• Jasveen Sangha, supplier — 15 years in federal prison
• Kenneth Iwamasa, personal assistant — 3 years, 5 months
• Jasveen Sangha's intermediary Erik Fleming — 2 years
• Dr. Salvador Plasencia, physician — 30 months
• Dr. Mark Chavez, physician — 8 months home detention

Who is affected, and what comes next

For Perry's family and the friends who appear in the series, the project is framed as an attempt to control how his legacy is told, three years after his death produced a wave of tabloid coverage of the overdose itself. For Netflix, the series is the latest in a run of true-crime-adjacent celebrity documentaries that pair a streaming premiere with a true anniversary date, a pattern the company has used before with other high-profile subjects. For addiction-treatment advocates, the series revisits Perry's public campaigning for drug courts and treatment-focused sentencing, work that drew on his own relapses and that continues through the Matthew Perry Foundation, established in his name after his death.

Variety reported on the project when Netflix first confirmed it in early September, noting that the streamer had not said whether any of Perry's "Friends" castmates would take part, a question that remained unanswered through the premiere. The series does not reopen the criminal case — that record is now closed, barring any appeal — but its release ensures the prosecution's outcome will reach a far wider audience than the sentencing hearings themselves drew. Netflix has not released viewership figures for the series' opening days, and the company does not typically do so within the first day of a title's release.