Matthew Perry (Chandler) has died

Theyre all very talented people. Aniston has had a good career and Courtney Cox had a career even before Friends. Schwimmer, for my money, is an amazing comic actor and seems to have many strings to his bow.

Schwimmer was the one early on who convinced the rest of the cast to negotiate their contracts as a group rather than individually. It meant when the show became successful they had huge bargaining power and it's a big reason why they got such huge wages.

I hated his character, but Schwimmer definitely seems to have his head screwed on right.

Chandler was far and away my favourite character though. They all started out as decent characters, but over the seasons they all became such wacky and exaggerated versions of themselves and mostly became super dumb and annoying (Joey and Phoebe in particular, as bad as they were in early seasons they were absolute morons by the end). Chandler was probably the most consistent throughout. Perry had him nailed right from the start and there was little change needed to him over time.

They were always very united as a cast.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised if they are co-ordinating so they can pay tribute to Matthew together.

Technically he could. He was born in the US and had US citizenship.

Here he is taking on Peter Hitchens for his opinions on addiction and talking about his own experience with it on BBC 10 years ago

Sad news, poor guy, way to young. Didn't know he went to school with Justin Trudeau.

As for the edgy "never rated friends" crew that inexplicably insist on posting & obviously watched the series, a single ad slot in the Friends finale during the cost $2 million.

That's ratings.

Very sad. Young man. Chandler in seasons 1-4 Friends one a the best comedy characters ever. So brilliantly portrayed and delivered by Perry.

So very sad, he made me laugh many times but seemed such a tortured soul in recent years. R.I.P.

He was born in Massachusetts for those saying he was Canadian btw.

Seinfeld was great, Friends was quite good.

I think you're overestimating me there kowlooney. I wouldn't be smart enough to be that sarcastic. It wasn't a piss take of modern audiences.

Far from it. If the medium you reference is comedy; then I firmly believe that the current generation of screen/tv writers are primarily to blame for the sh*te peddled as humour these days. Followed by Studios/Production Companies and then finally, audiences.

The all important financial bottom-line $eems to have smoothed over and beiged-out all the edginess and novelty from modern comedy. With a few honourable exceptions.

Studios/Producers default mode these days seems to be short-term scrambling for immediate success. Immediate financial success. Nothing is allowed to be nurtured. Comedy junk food that's ultimately as unsatisfying as any McDonalds.

A good analogy would be the so-called 'Shrinkflation' we've been hearing about recently...e.g. a Mars bar is now 25% smaller than it was 10 years ago, yet more expensive. You can't really blame the consumer for that. And these manufacturers hope the consumers either won't notice or care. Best case scenario, too dumb to notice.

Comedy has been dumbed down too - an endless parade of the most transparent of punchlines covered with that grubby condom of manic canned-laughter. It's horrible. The ultra-lazy or simply untalented writing is a result of too many jobs being available, in a sphere which has exploded due to the rise of Streaming.

So you end up with mediocre ten-a-penny writers. Producing bland inoffensive tripe, safe in the knowledge that the next job is only an email away, just as soon as this latest show goes down the crapper. What's worse, is that the general output has gone through it's own process of the 'Shrinkflation', the jokes are less frequent and less funny, inferior ingredients... at least to my taste. And, we're paying more.

Having said all that, tl:dr - Modern audiences are being sold sh*te but they're also buying sh*te. So who do ya blame?