Netflix will release a three-part documentary titled The One About Matthew Perry on October 27, 2026, built around unreleased photos and video from the Perry family’s private archive along with testimonies that have never been made public, according to Netflix’s own Tudum announcement. The date lands one day before the third anniversary of Perry’s death in October 2023, and it marks the first documentary to dig into his life beyond the Chandler Bing persona that made him famous.

Family Archive Footage, Not Studio Outtakes

What separates this project from the usual celebrity retrospective is where the footage is coming from. Rather than leaning on network B-roll or talk-show clips, the series draws on home movies, photos, and personal recordings pulled directly from Perry’s family, according to reporting from ABC Audio confirming the same details Netflix laid out in its announcement. Perry’s sister, Mia Perry Bowick, a licensed psychotherapist, is a central voice in the series, alongside lifelong friends and creative collaborators who knew him before Friends turned him into one of the most recognizable sitcom actors of the 1990s.

Directed by an Emmy Winner With a Documentary Track Record

Emmy-winning director Mary Robertson is behind the project, produced by Maxine Productions through Sony Pictures Television. In Netflix’s own release materials, Robertson said Perry “was one of the comedic geniuses of our time” who “made millions of us laugh, connect, and feel a little less alone.” Mia Perry Bowick’s own statement, also included in Netflix’s announcement, described the years it took to feel ready to revisit those memories, framing the series as an attempt to show what it meant to love Perry through the full complexity of his life, not just the public version of him.

Chandler Bing and the Show That Defined a Sitcom Decade

Perry’s fame was inseparable from Friends, the NBC sitcom that ran from 1994 to 2004 and became one of the defining ensemble comedies of the era, turning its six leads into some of the highest-paid actors on television by the show’s later seasons. Chandler Bing’s sarcastic delivery became so tied to Perry’s public identity that fans and interviewers spent decades asking him to separate the character from the man playing him. A documentary built on unreleased family material is a different kind of answer to that question than another clip package of his best Friends one-liners.

Whether the series succeeds will depend on whether it resists turning into hagiography or a cautionary-tale package built solely around his public struggles with addiction, both easy defaults for this kind of project. What Netflix is promising instead is testimony from the people who knew him before any of it, using footage nobody outside his family has ever seen. For a sitcom generation that still quotes his timing, that’s a genuinely different way into a story most viewers think they already know.