Matthew Perry and the End of the Monoculture
Many, many years ago I wrote a wildly unsuccessful column for Rotten Tomatoes called The Simpsons Decade. The Simpsons Decade’s premise was anything but simple or commercial.
In a failed column that began life as a failed book proposal before dying an early, premature but eminently predictable death I posited the 1990s as a unique time in both comedy and American pop culture.
It was a time of peace and prosperity. The internet was going to make all of our lives perfect and we no longer had to worry about those pesky Commies because the United States had won the Cold War.
Everything was great! That’s in sharp contrast to now, where everything is terrible.
Because we had solved all of our problems, American pop culture looked inward and became deeply post-modern and meta-textual, particularly where television was concerned.
The Simpsons Decade depicted the 1990s as the final decade that television ruled triumphant as the all-powerful motor of American pop culture and, by extension, American life itself.
In the decades ahead the internet would fill the role formerly occupied by television, in no small part because the internet allowed us to watch television in new, exciting and revelatory ways.
The 1990s was also the last hurrah of the monoculture. After the turn of the century we would fracture into a million little niches but in the 1990s there was still pop culture that EVERYONE knew and EVERYONE had an opinion about.
When I think about the 1990s monoculture two television shows spring to mind: Seinfeld and Friends. If you weren’t alive during the height of Friends’ popularity it can be hard to understand just how huge it was.
Friends was massive. And because Friends was massive its cast was similarly massive, individually and collectively. The sitcom was so important culturally that, as with Keeping Up with the Kardashians, some obnoxious souls defined themselves by their unwillingness to watch even a single episode.
I’ve said it before and I will say it again. You’re not special for not liking Friends or Taylor Swift or Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Not liking popular things doesn’t make you interesting, or original. It also does not mean that you have good taste.
Yet people nevertheless took pride in being indifferent to a popular television sitcom. That’s the other thing about Friends. It wasn’t just mainstream or commercial: it damn near defined the mainstream.
Because the show was so insanely popular audiences became deeply invested in its characters and their relationships as well as the actors in the cast.
Matt LeBlanc, David Schwimmer, Matthew Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Lisa Kudrow and Courtney Cox were a huge part of people’s past. Even if you did not watch Friends you knew about it. You knew the catchphrases, the romances, the drama.
Friends was so huge that it dwarfed the individual careers of its cast-members. That was the blessing and the curse of being part of one of the most successful television shows of all time: Matthew Perry was doomed to always be Matthew Perry from Friends no matter who he played.
Perry’s biggest, most ubiquitous role followed him everywhere he went. No matter what he did he would always be Matthew Perry from Friends.
So when Perry died both unexpectedly and expectedly part of our individual and collective past died with him.
I suspect a similar dynamic will be at play when the first Seinfeld cast-member dies. There’ll be a surprisingly vast explosion of grief and mourning and despair because of the huge role the show played back in the distant past, when EVERYBODY watched, or at least knew, about the most popular sitcoms.
When we mourn Matthew Perry, part of what we’re mourning is the end of the monoculture, the idea that there’s one big mainstream that everybody knows about instead of an endless assortment of little subcultures.
Perry was a very successful television actor and a less successful movie star but he represented something much bigger than himself and that is why his death is having such a big impact on a culture that never forgot Friends or the six household names in its cast.
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