Matthew Perry saved Friends by making the writers drop a storyline where Chandler cheated on Monica

A lot of people are taking Matthew Perry’s death as an opportunity to reflect on Friends, and actor Lisa Cash—who appeared in one episode of the show—shared a surprising reveal with TMZ about a bullet that the show was apparently only able to dodge because of how much Perry cared about Friends and Chandler Bing. According to Cash (Variety says nobody involved with the production of the show has confirmed any of this), she was hired for the 1999 episode “The One In Vegas: Part 1” to play an employee at a hotel that Chandler was going to cheat on Monica with.

Supposedly, this would’ve been part of a storyline where Courteney Cox’s Monica had lunch with ex-boyfriend Richard and Chandler got very upset about it, causing the two of them to have a big argument and somehow leading to Chandler cheating on Monica while in Las Vegas. Cash says that, the day before shooting the episode, Perry himself went to the writers and explained that “the audience would never forgive [Chandler] for cheating on Monica,” and the storyline was cut. Cash’s role was then switched to a flight attendant in a scene with Ross and Joey instead.

Cash suspects that the original version “would’ve changed possibly the course of the show and his character,” which seems like an understatement—because Perry is absolutely correct that nobody would’ve ever forgiven him, and moving forward with this storyline would’ve meant everyone involved completely misunderstood these characters. See, it’s okay for David Schwimmer’s Ross to get into those kinds of storylines, since he famously cheated on Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel while they were “on a break” in a pretty similar situation, because Ross is sort of the martyr of any given Friends storyline. You want to see him fail because it’s funny when he fails, and his character exists to make that possible while still being likable because that’s who he is from the moment you meet him. Ross is funny because he’s a loser and the audience knows he’s a loser, but he refuses to accept it with every fiber of his being.

Chandler, on the other hand, is a perpetual underdog character. Like Ross, he’s a loser, but a different kind of loser who is constantly aware of it. You laugh at him because he tries to be funny and often is not, which makes him endearing, rather than him just being the “funny guy”—which is who Joey is anyway, but we’re not here to unpack him. If Chandler ever stopped being endearing and became cruel, which is what would’ve happened if he had cheated on Monica, then he would stop being an underdog and it would break his character—and then, probably, the show.