I would say that, for the members of my Gen X cohort, Matthew Perry's death has been experienced with particular pain because it signifies the rupture with one of the only bridges that reminded us of the prosperous nineties. For me, Friends always made me a bit lazy, due to its distortion of New York happiness (what the corny call "aspirational narrative") starring some kids who lived as perpetual adolescents, doomed to conflicts of no transcendence whatsoever. But, nevertheless, I perfectly understand that my contemporaries' hearts have shrunk seeing how one of the children of our striking post-Olympism ended up killing himself in a jacuzzi, drunk as a skunk. At the risk of seeming insensitive, I would say that Perry's death is absolutely logical if we assume the destiny of someone who could still be a victim of success and who, after all, was striving to die.
Precisely because I have always been much more interested in the gruesome than in the blessed life, at home we lived the nineties through a contemporary series of Friends such as Frasier, a wonderful comedy that has just announced its television comeback. Despite taking place in Seattle, the work starring the psychiatrist Frasier Crane could have perfectly happened in Manhattan (his character's snobbery is purely New York). But unlike the guys from Friends, the series by the geniuses of Grub Street Productions had the grace of emerging from the protagonist's failures, a divorced forty-something, forced to live with his father, with a sordid love life and extremely high cultural aspirations contrasting with his condition as a host of a self-help radio program. If Friends still believed in communalism, Frasier was proof that the social contract basically arises from frustration.
I would say that, despite not being its natural audience, Xers have ended up adoring Frasier because it portrays the aspiration of a generation that boomers had described as "the most prepared in history" but which has revealed how their academic training (also access to globalized knowledge and the virtual world) did not help them live better than their parents. In a way, the attempts of Frasier Crane and his brother Niles to access Seattle's elites ---whether inside the most exclusive wine clubs or in the stalls of an opera house--- are a mirror of our inability to access the political and cultural power structures that have commanded Catalonia (there are many Xers who have set foot there, of course, but they share the characteristic of being the dumbest in the class). In this sense, Frasier ending did not represent any trauma for us, because the trauma was the work itself.
As a derivative of all this, as Colin Marshall recently recalled in the New Yorker, it is logical that Frasier is a media product inscribed in the cultural power of psychotherapy that Philip Rieff described so well in The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (1966). I like the protagonist of the series because, despite being a subject of spiritual healing (a task that philosophers performed for a long time) his life is that of a perfectly disastrous patient. In fact, any social adventure in Frasier Crane's life ---from his marriage to living with his father, a retired police officer--- necessarily leads to the collapse of personalities. The psychologization of traumatic life has another interesting derivative because, ultimately, the men of my generation have only ended up being honest with our psychoanalyst.
I would say that Frasier is still the best remedy to go from being an idiotic narcissist to a minimally decadent and funny narcissist. The city is the perfect setting to mock the subject himself and, in this sense, it would be fantastic if one of our screenwriters invented a Barcelona equivalent of Dr. Crane. I don't know if I will watch the revival of the series that Sky Showtime has just premiered; but I sense that someone like Matthew Perry would have done very well to watch the original because, after all, it is a good school to exalt failure and always doubt success.