[from Maclean’s, 10/2/95]

Matthew Perry is sitting on top of the world - make that on top of the Hollywood Hills. Well, actually, he is sitting on a couch, in his house near the top of the Hollywood Hills. But it is a nice house, with a spectacular view - smog notwithstanding - of Los Angeles to the south. There is a black Porsche sitting outside the secluded three-bedroom bungalow, which he moved into only four months ago. In the kitchen, there is a brand-new refrigerator, also black. "Pretty neat, huh?" Perry says as he grabs two Cokes from the fridge (not much else in there, by the way). And in the east bedroom, Hispanic workmen are busy putting the finishing touches on a mahogany monstrosity of shelves and drawers. "They're just making a desk in my office," says Perry - but then he catches himself. "I sounded so adult there - 'a desk in my office.' I even threw in the word 'office' just to make you really impressed."

He doesn't need to boast: Matthew Perry is obviously all grown up - and at just the right time. Now 26, the Ottawa native has caught a wave that is changing the face of network television, not to mention his material circumstances. In its first season last year, the half-hour NBC sitcom Friends, in which Perry co-stars as the wisecracking but basically unhappy Chandler in an ensemble cast of twenty-something’s, consistently ranked in the top 20 in the ratings, in many weeks grabbing the No. 3 spot, behind the long-running sitcom Seinfeld and the medical drama ER. During the summer, Friends was often the No. 1-rated show in rerun in the United States, and its season opener last week (on CanWest Global in Canada) was one of the most hotly anticipated premières of the new TV season.

Call it the Friends phenomenon. The faces of the cast - Perry, David Schwimmer (Ross), Matt LeBlanc (Joey), Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe), Jennifer Aniston (Rachel) and Courteney Cox (Monica) - have been staples of lifestyle and entertainment magazine covers for the past year. The show's theme son, an insipidly catch tune called I'll Be There For You, topped the pop charts this summer. Even Maurice - the cute little monkey owned by Ross on the show - got some high-profile movie work during the off-season with a starring role in the Dustin Hoffman thriller Outbreak.

As a successful Generation X sitcom, the show is a break-through. And that does not surprise Perry, who ascribes the success of Friends to a simple fact: "I knew that it was good from the time I read the pilot." He adds, "It is character-driven comedy, that comes from conversation, not situation. And it is intelligent."

The premise is simple. Three attractive young women and three attractive young men hang out in a New York City apartment, drink coffee and make jokes. They are single and basically dissatisfied, too busy struggling with their dead-end jobs, their failed sex lives and their feelings for one another to settle down and make babies. The show pushes all the now-familiar buttons of Generation X: dissatisfaction with middle-class jobs and values, sexual angst in the age of AIDS, the disintegration of the nuclear family, and - most tellingly - fear of commitment to either love or career.

Like it or not, that recipe provides the dominant flavour of the new TV season. In the wake of Friends, the old baby-boomer formulas for attracting audiences are fading, and all the Big Four U.S. networks - NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox - are scrambling to snare younger viewers. This season, the nets have produced a host of Friends clones - among them Caroline in the City and The Single Guy (NBC), Too Something and Partners (Fox), The Drew Carey Show (ABC), and Can't Hurry Love (CBS). Such cloning, of course, has long been a fact of life in a medium remarkable for its lack of originality. But the Friends phenomenon is the hallmark of something different in television. Boomers and seniors beware: TV in the lingo of media analysts, is "aging down."