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The Comeback aired from June until September 2005 on the HBO Cable Network.
Created by two of Hollywood's top comedic talents, Lisa Kudrow (Friends) and Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King, The Comeback was a scripted show about a woman trying to manage her unscripted life in the minefield that is television. Wrenchingly "real" and ridiculously surreal, it was a world where success and failure were often determined by age, looks, and (perhaps less frequently) sheer determination.
Lisa Kudrow starred as Valerie Cherish, a faded former sitcom star so desperate to revive her career that she agreed to be the focus of a reality TV show called The Comeback, which followed her every move as she attempt to land a part in a new network sitcom about "four sexy singles living in a condo." The Comeback (the HBO show, that is) drew back the curtain on the brutal hilarity of reality TV, the madness of network sitcoms, and the comic trials of a 40ish actress struggling to resuscitate her career and control her personal life - all under the unforgiving scrutiny of the camera.
Weaving in and out of Valerie's wake were her husband Mark (Damian Young) and her housekeeper Esperanza (Lillian Hurst), who were ill at ease sharing their lives with the voyeuristic cameras. Luckily there was Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), Valerie's jovial hairdresser, who was happy to camp it up ("I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille" he chuckled into the lenses that greeted him at Valerie's front door) - that 's when he was not fretting about his health benefits. Accompanying (and usually eclipsing) Valerie on the set of her new sitcom were "the kids," four scarcely-clad young singles who were in grade school when she starred in her hit series I'm It! Capturing everything for the cameras was Jane (Laura Silverman), the hard-edged reality show producer who clashed with Valerie as she struggled to control the behind-the-scenes chronicles of her unraveling life.
A show-within-a-show-within-a-show, The Comeback was an original and timely look at the humor and humiliations that often accompanied the single-minded pursuit of the limelight, and what passed for entertainment and "reality" in the meat-grinder that was modern day television.
An Article from the New York Times
Lisa Kudrow, This Time Without Any Friends
By ALEXANDRA JACOBS
Published: May 15, 2005
Santa Monica, Calif.
ON a recent afternoon along Montana Avenue, a street filled with the kind of rich suburban-mom boutiques that emit the gentlest of dings when you cross the threshold, about 50 cast and crew members gathered to tape a scene for the new HBO series "The Comeback." Directed by Michael Patrick King, late of HBO's "Sex and the City," it stars the former "Friends" star Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, a has-been actress who has consented to be trailed by video cameras 24 hours a day in the hope of reinvigorating her career - for, as she briskly declares, "Reality TV is the reality of TV - and I'm a survivor."
In the course of a few minutes, the terminally plucky Valerie fumbles with a dangling body microphone ("They can put a man on the moon, but they can't make a body mike that doesn't make you look like you're passing linguine?" she wisecracks) and strolls past a newsstand, where she glimpses an Entertainment Weekly cover that asks "Is Reality TV Over?" and visibly deflates. It took 12 takes to strike the right note of spontaneous awkwardness in this scene.
It's a lot of work to make a fake reality TV show - and fake, its co-creators Ms. Kudrow and Mr. King want to stress, is exactly what "The Comeback" is. Scheduled to follow "Entourage," another knowing examination of show business, it is not some derivation of "Lisa Kudrow," ΰ la Larry David in "Curb Your Enthusiasm" or Kirstie Alley in "Fat Actress." It is "a black comedy about the reality of television," as Mr. King put it, entirely fictional and scripted (by a staff of six writers drawn from sitcom, dramedy and sketch comedy). For starters, Ms. Kudrow is not exactly in need of a comeback, having worked steadily for over a decade, most notably as the spacily sage bohemian Phoebe Buffay on the NBC hit "Friends." "I have nothing to complain about," she said during lunch with Mr. King at Michael's in Santa Monica a few days before the Montana Avenue scene was taped. Nor is she interested in playing a version of herself, a married woman with a child living quietly - "I am not in the tabloids," she pointed out - near Beverly Hills. Mr. King smiled indulgently. "I've been very blessed," he said, "to work with actresses who were not so self-involved in their image that they don't want to act."
The two collaborators first became friendly on an NBC lot in the early 1990's, while Mr. King was struggling to make the leap from sitcom writer to executive producer and Ms. Kudrow was playing a supporting role on "Mad About You." She was also a member of the renowned comedy troupe the Groundlings. (Mr. King remembered being impressed by her improvisation of Audrey Hepburn visiting a hillbilly fishing program.) One of her monologue characters was called Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show: "Just me laughing at this endlessly needy ego that's self-promoting," Ms. Kudrow said, "but in the name of talking about 'the work.' "
Then both of their fortunes turned. "Friends" and "Sex and the City" were lavished with critical and popular acclaim and dominated the Emmys and Golden Globes for years. "I would see Lisa at awards shows, in gowns - you know, regal - sitting at the next table," Mr. King said. "We'd analyze who was closer to the stage and therefore more likely to win." In 2004, both shows wrapped up long runs and went into lucrative syndication. After the artistic license he'd enjoyed on cable - the ability to use profanity, the freedom from a canned laugh track - Mr. King was wary of working on a network. Meanwhile, Ms. Kudrow, who will turn 42 in July, was being offered quirky roles in independent films, going from acting younger than her age on "Friends" to occasionally being asked to play "matronly" or "uptight." The Favorite Actress character wafted back into her consciousness, and she and Mr. King met at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills to discuss it.
They discovered a mutual interest in the sudden on-air dominance of reality TV, a concept that didn't even exist when their own mega-successful shows first went on the air. "When I would watch shows like 'The Amazing Race,' " Mr. King said, "I would always wonder stuff like, when they were on the plane, where are the cameras? How does this really happen? People are so familiar with reality shows, but maybe they might be interested in seeing one more step back, where the camera's included." Thus "The Comeback" is purposefully, artfully sloppy. In its dogged, unrelenting simulation of reality - including a scene in which Ms. Cherish's husband audibly defecates - it is somehow much more true than actual reality TV. "The camera lingers," Ms. Kudrow said. "Past the point of comfort," Mr. King added.
Part of the fun of the show is that it addresses the continuing ratings battle between traditional comedies and reality TV. As the story goes, "Valerie Cherish" rose to prominence on a sitcom called "I'm It!" that ran from 1989 to 1992. "A B-level sitcom," Mr. King said. "You know those shows that were on for years that you never saw? 'I'm It!' is one of those. This is of a different time, when women were on top in television, and it was like: 'She had it all! She was a lawyer! She was sexy!' " A former writer for "Murphy Brown" and "Cybill," Mr. King waxed nostalgic for an era of television history when "there was all this kind of 'Philadelphia Story' stuff that women were allowed to do." He continued: "They had long monologues, they talked and talked and talked, they all had business suits and their apartments had views of skylines. Where did they go? Where did they go? Where did they go?"
In one of the more hilarious and excruciating moments in the pilot episode of "The Comeback," Valerie Cherish learns that she has been downgraded from a leading role as an architect in a new sitcom called "Room and Bored" (about "four sexy singles in Manhattan Beach," a wink at "Friends" and "Sex and the City," Mr. King said), to the marginal and humiliating part of "Aunt Sassy," the landlady who lives upstairs like Mrs. Roper on "Three's Company." An overhead camera in Valerie Cherish's kitchen captures her practicing one line over and over as she works her way through a chocolate cake, pulled out of a refrigerator packed with Zone meals. "She reminds me of a salesman - like Willy Loman," Ms. Kudrow said. "Just give her a modicum of respect - just a little drop - and she'll be really cooperative."
Mr. King said: "No matter how much she achieves, there'll always be a 22-year-old actress standing next to her, because Valerie Cherish isn't real, we didn't have to pay homage to anything except the story we wanted to tell, about how a woman can be ground up by her own need."
As lunch wound down, Michael McCarty, the restaurant's owner, came over to pay his own homage to the star. "Nice to see you," he said. "Thanks for coming in today. Hope you enjoyed yourself. Eat your greens. Keep doing it!"
"You too," Ms. Kudrow said politely. Mr. McCarty ambled off.
"You see?" Mr. King said in a stage whisper. "That's what Valerie Cherish hopes to get. That would make her day. But it's not going to happen. We want people to sit in the uncomfortable reality of what reality is, versus the slick, cleaned-up version of reality TV."
A Review from Variety
Lisa Kudrow, 'The Comeback'
By ROBERT HOFLER
Posted: Wed., Jun. 7, 2006, 10:00pm PT
Last spring, Broadway actors found a similar respite ritual after putting in a full 8 perfs. Come Sunday night, they often gathered together to enjoy a communal rest in front of the tube. The show? HBO's new comedy series "The Comeback," starring Lisa Kudrow.
Legit thesps, especially those with a TV pedigree, could relate: In Valerie Cherish, here was a workaday actress, not exactly a star, who was so desperate to keep her career alive that she stooped to making herself the subject of a reality TV show called, with all due self-imposed humiliation, "The Comeback."
And there was more mortification: For her day job, Kudrow's Cherish played an aging supporting character named Aunt Sassy on a "Friends"-style sitcom called "Room and Board," which pit her against a beer-drinking, pizza-chomping creator-writer named Paulie G (Lance Barber). Aunt Sassy, "Room and Board," Paulie G. Does it get any lower on TV than that?
"The showrunners and writers can be more difficult than the actors," says Kudrow. "And supporting characters are not given the credibility of a lead. There is a hierarchy, and it is blatant."
Having done "Friends" for 10 years, Kudrow knows of what she speaks -- but with significant qualifications. "I know how a show gets launched, the basics," she says, "but the intimate details of 'The Comeback' had nothing to do with 'Friends,' which was always very collaborative."
Also unlike the long-running "Friends," "The Comeback" lasted a mere 13 episodes. Actors loved the show, but the rest of the TV-watching world, according to Kudrow, broke into three distinct groups: "One group thought Valerie was a masochist and (wondered) why she doesn't stand up for herself. The other group thought that nothing could stop her and she was strong. And the third group was, 'Man, what an idiot!' "
Which brings to mind the advice Lee Strasberg once gave a student: "You laugh well. You cry well. Now do both at the same time."
On "The Comeback," Kudrow proved she could play masochism, strength and idiocy all at the same time.
SOUND BITES
Lisa Kudrow created the Valerie Cherish character for the Groundlings. "So she was easy to slip into," says the actress.
But how would Val develop and evolve if, in fact, there were more seasons to come?
"On the DVD, Michael Patrick King and I wrote two new scenes," Kudrow reveals. "They're on hiatus from 'Room and Board,' so Valerie thought it was silly not to have the cameras on her. So she goes on 'Dancing With the Stars.' "
Regarding a whole new second season, Kudrow believes the character had the potential to grow, especially after Jay Leno embraced her barfing brouhaha in the final episode: "Valerie's attitude would be a shade different. We ended with her a success. How would she use that power? Would she get Paulie G fired? His replacement could be so much worse."
A Review from USA TODAY
Come back, Lisa Kudrow
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
HBO could use a comeback all right, but this isn't it.
Instead, teamed with the network's much better but not hugely popular Entourage, The Comeback will probably exacerbate HBO's ratings and critical slide. A pity, because it marks the sitcom return of talented Lisa Kudrow. The problem is that in its desire to create hothouse-flower series that are "not TV," HBO keeps nurturing shows no one wants.
This time, HBO turned to recognized hitmakers: Kudrow and Sex and the City's Michael Patrick King. As co-creators and writers, they have created a bleak assault on almost everything TV, including sitcoms, reality, writers, executives, and aging, insecure actresses. (Related story: Kudrow back in the field)
Kudrow is Valerie Cherish, a faded star who is desperately seeking a comeback. The show is not autobiographical: Valerie is neither as gifted nor as respected as Kudrow, and her I'm It! sitcom was not a blockbuster like Friends. But Kudrow is clearly playing on our affection for herself and Phoebe, which makes Valerie's humiliations all the more depressing.
We meet Valerie as she auditions to play the "slightly older" friend in Room and Bored, a sitcom about four sexy singles sharing an apartment. But there's a catch: To get the role, she has to agree to let cameras follow her for a reality show about the making of Bored, called The Comeback. Which means those cameras will record her pain as her role in Bored changes and shrinks.
The concept lets the show stick close to Valerie while satirizing sitcom and reality conventions. Unfortunately, the jokes aimed at sitcoms tend to be too bitter and inside, and the ones aimed at "celebrity camera" reality shows slam a target that is old and over.
Despite Kudrow's ability and appeal, the real barrier to viewer enjoyment is the self-absorbed, oafish Valerie. We have no reason to root for her success, nor to take pleasure in the weekly assaults on her dignity.
In the end, HBO is asking you to spend a half-hour a week with a deluded loser, watch her be degraded by reality and sitcom hacks, and pay for the privilege. Doesn't sound like a good way to make a comeback.
An Article From Entertainment Weekly
Television News
Lisa Kudrow's New Reality
Lisa Kudrow on her ''Comeback''. The ex-''Friends'' star talks about her HBO show -- part comedy, part reality show, part Hollywood satire, and all entirely surreal
AS SEEN ON TV Kudrow missed Hollywood so much she created her own show
Lisa Kudrow Photograph by Gavin Bond
By Alynda Wheat
''What is there to do in TV?'' asks Lisa Kudrow, sitting in her office on the Paramount lot in West Hollywood. ''There are reality shows, that's the newest thing. I'm not gonna do a reality show. I'm not comfortable with it.'' If pressed, Kudrow will demonstrate how uncomfortable she is with reality TV by mimicking what she thinks is the genre's most egregious moment a spicy-soup-eating contest from The Amazing Race 6 that got projectile fast. ''Blecchhhh!'' she erupts, doubled over in mock convulsions. ''They're vomiting on TV! Vomiting and crying! I've never seen anything more humiliating in my life.''
Over at the opposite end of the hall, where Sex and the City executive producer Michael Patrick King has his office, the view on reality TV is far sunnier. King, who met Kudrow through a friend during her days in the L.A. improv troupe the Groundlings, has a bad case of reality fever. Mention Tyra Banks' recent freak-out on America's Next Top Model, and he'll reenact the meltdown. ''SHUT UP!'' he screeches, jabbing the air in a Banksian frenzy. ''I HAVE NEVER YELLED AT A GIRL LIKE THIS!'' For King, reality TV is a ''late-night dessert'' not the end of Western civilization.
So what's a little conflict between friends? In this case, it resulted in a Frankensteinian hybrid of sitcom, reality show, and spirit-crushing tragedy called The Comeback (debuting June 5 at 9:30 p.m.). HBO's newest Hollywood navel-gazer stars Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, a vain, sad, fortysomething actress who was once semi-famous, and is now so desperate to be semi-famous again that she consents to a bit part in a tacky sitcom called Room and Bored. As part of the deal, she also must do a reality show chronicling her life as a has-been, and Comeback is shot entirely from the point of view of the reality TV cameras. Or, as Kudrow explains: ''It's a show within a show about a woman who was on another show.''
Okay, then. Valerie Cherish emerged a few months after Kudrow taped Friends' final episode. The 41-year-old actress who busied herself after the finale by shooting Don Roos' Happy Endings and pitching pilots with her production company, Is or Isn't couldn't stop thinking about a character she created with the Groundlings called Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show. ''She's this actress who's self-important,'' says Kudrow. ''She wants to come off as genuinely nice. And she's not even that good of an actress.'' Kudrow and her producing partner, Dan Bucatinsky, thought Your Favorite Actress might be able to carry her own show but first, she wanted King and his producing partner, John Melfi, to meet her over lunch.
''I started having ideas like, What if it was more about the idea of the reality of a reality show?'' recalls King, whose schedule cleared after Sex and the City finished last year and the subsequent movie fell apart. ''Put her in an arena that is basically a war zone, which is an actress on a sitcom at a time when sitcoms and reality shows are at war for attention.'' Things moved quickly after that: Within six months, they met with HBO, signed a deal, and shot Comeback's pilot.
Just one question: Why is Kudrow, who went out on such a high, and who couldn't possibly need the money (given those $1 million-per-episode Friends paychecks), returning to TV so fast? ''I love acting,'' she says. ''I'd only not done it from January to March [of 2004], and I felt like, 'Oh, I miss acting.''' And surprisingly, if Kudrow wanted a TV gig, she'd have to come up with one herself: ''No one was clamoring for me to do anything.''
While Kudrow developed the character, King started doing his homework. He sat down with reality producers and watched hours of unaired footage to add verisimilitude to the humiliations heaped on Valerie, like one scene in which she's badgered about her feelings. ''I wouldn't have the balls to have a producer be that direct if I hadn't seen footage of people going, 'What are you feeling? You're feeling blank, what are you feeling? At this moment, you are feeling what?''' If it makes you cringe, says King, that's good. ''One of our goals was to show how much crueler reality is than reality TV.''
What Comeback is not, says Kudrow, is a paranoid fantasy of her own future in Hollywood. ''It's not, 'Oh, Lisa Kudrow's doing a reality show about her comeback.' That's clearly not what it is.'' And Valerie, she insists, is nothing like her. Valerie is ''almost a human being,'' Kudrow deadpans. She has a nice house, a husband, a stepdaughter, and yet ''she still wants something; she wants to be in a world where there's no room for her.'' King breaks down the difference between the two even more: ''Lisa was it. Valerie was never it.''
It's a perfect afternoon in the desert, and a scene set in the Parker Palm Springs hotel's retro-'70s lounge in which Valerie and her husband, Mark (Damian Young), meet friends for drinks (with reality cameras in tow) isn't gelling. Kudrow, King, and director Michael Lehmann (Heathers) bend their heads over the script, tweaking dialogue. It will be nearly dark when they finish figuring out how to shoot the scene, while the reality cameras try to get their own fake footage for the real show. ''It's like lightning in a bottle,'' confides exec producer Melfi. ''The choreography of the cameras and the performances will happen once. Once, you'll get it and that's it.''
If shooting is hard, writing a show within a show is near impossible, even for Emmy winners. King likens it to the M.C. Escher print ''showing the hand drawing the hand.'' So maybe it's understandable that he's a tad defensive should you ask if, after tepid audience reactions to HBO's Unscripted and Entourage (not to mention Showtime's under-performing Fat Actress), America might be over the inside-Hollywood reality-sitcom thing. ''This isn't about inside Hollywood. It's about inside Valerie,'' he insists. ''Entourage is all about a posse of boys looking for p---y. I wouldn't say you could link Valerie up with any of those guys.'' While HBO Entertainment president Carolyn Strauss admits that the Hollywood angle could be a hurdle for Comeback, she says the characters will draw people in. ''One level [these shows] are about is Hollywood and then on the other level they're about people. What we're really looking at is the essence of human beings,'' she says. ''I'm counting on people to like this show.''
If they don't, Kudrow has no worries. ''I'm okay if not everybody likes it,'' she says, suggesting she can continue to build her burgeoning independent-film career (Clockwatchers, The Opposite of Sex) should her television Comeback be short-lived. ''Like her?'' she asks, wrinkling her nose at the very idea. ''You're just supposed to want to watch her.''
An Article from The Washington Post
Lisa Kudrow Sheds Phoebe's Skin
The Former 'Friends' Actress Is Starring in Her Own 'Comeback.' Not So Dumb, Huh?
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 20, 2005;
LOS ANGELES
Lisa Kudrow is squinting in the sun on the hotel patio. Pleasure to meet you. So tell us everything about Brad and Jen. There is a beat, a professional pause, and then Kudrow gives that little nose crinkle, a trademark tell perfected over a decade of playing the ditz twins Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on "Friends," and snorts, "Yeah, right."
In the iconography of the "Friends" ensemble, Kudrow played the space cadet(s), but she is actually known off-screen as "the smart one." Perhaps because she graduated from Vassar and studied biology? Her area of interest: the evolution of the biochemistry of human emotion. A burden. Or not.
"When I was first playing Ursula and Phoebe, because people would think you're dumb, they end up saying things in front of you that they wouldn't say in front of a guy or somebody who they thought was paying attention or would do something with the information, like it was way over my head," she says. "That could be useful."
Now she is doing something interesting with her career, first in the new HBO show "The Comeback," a dark comedy about a network sitcom and reality TV, which she co-created with Michael Patrick King, of "Sex and the City."
And also in the new movie "Happy Endings," by the writer-director Don Roos ("The Opposite of Sex"), which is an ensemble drama masquerading as a comedy about: family, betrayal, relationships, lies, longing, children, and Javier the Latino masseur and hottie sex worker. The reviewers are mostly liking it. (It opened Friday in Washington and select other cities.)
First, "The Comeback." The Sunday-night series is about the bottomless need and delusional sado-pathology of a C-level television actress, the character Valerie Cherish, as she struggles to return, way past her stamped expiration date, in a "Friends"-like retread about four sexed-up twenty-somethings. Valerie assumes she is going to play one of the swingles, but her role is switched to the batty upstairs landlady, Aunt Sassy, and she is not the mother of jokes but their butt. To make matters worse, Valerie's stab at a comeback is the subject of a reality TV show, which is pitiless.
So, to refresh: "The Comeback" is a TV show about a TV show within a TV show. Valerie is a piρata for the evil show-runners and network suits. Not that Valerie is sympathetic. She would score a zero on the self-awareness scale. She is a damaged being, but still manages to be appalling. And funny. It's a neat trick.
"A dog pile of humiliation," says Kudrow, of her character's travails on the back lots of Burbank. "But she'll take it. Because her goal is over there." She is pointing off toward the Hollywood Hills. "And this is nothing. Nothing. She can take anything. That's how much she wants it. She doesn't need it, financially. Doesn't need to work. But it's not like she's an artist, either. She just wants celebrity and that's it."
But it's strange, Kudrow says, the feedback she is getting about the show. Many viewers, instead of laughing at Valerie, have begun to cheer her on. "They've invested in what she wants and they want her to have it," she says.
Though the show has not attracted huge numbers -- 786,000 viewers last week -- "The Comeback" is the kind of program that its viewers and TV critics feel strongly about. "Teeters on wonderful," wrote Tom Shales of The Washington Post. "The saddest comedy on television," pronounced Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times. On Web sites devoted to audience critiques of TV shows, the viewers seem divided. To say the HBO series is a dark comedy doesn't quite get it right: Some viewers confess they actually wince; others guiltily inhale the anti-Hollywood fumes.
"I love it," says David Crane, the co-creator of "Friends." "Your heart breaks every week, which is weird for a half-hour comedy experience." Crane, of long experience in the world of network TV, says: "It's truthful. They're going after everybody, and they do it really well. You don't watch and think, God, I'm so glad I'm in television."
Is it real? Is the business so cruel? Crane says, well, look at former stars on their reality TV venues -- shows like "The Surreal World" with Bronson Pinchot or "Fat Actress" with Kirstie Alley -- and "The Comeback" starts to look tame.
"You have to admire her, for the guts to come out and do this," says Danny Jacobson, writer, producer and co-creator of the Paul Reiser sitcom "Mad About You," on which Kudrow got her start on network television. She had a recurring part as an airhead waitress, a role that then morphed in Phoebe on "Friends," an "innocuous" show that Jacobson confesses he was not a big fan of, though he is of Kudrow.
"She is a really, really talented actress," Jacobson says, but like Henry Winkler, as the Fonz, "Lisa is going to be Phoebe for the rest of her life and her kid's life. That's the way it is with TV," with a character played for 10 years on a hit show. "So I applaud her taking chances." (Jacobson, too, is high on the HBO show and hopes it finds its audience.)
From the outline of "The Comeback," one might think the project is Kudrow's revenge, her re-spin of "Friends," but she insists it has little to do with the popular NBC comedy, now in endless rerun.
"I certainly was not drawing on any experience on 'Friends,' " which Kudrow describes as a mostly intelligent, supportive, creative enterprise (and a certainly lucrative experience at $1 million per cast member per episode in the later years). "I was interested in this character," she says.
Valerie Cherish was hatched, Kudrow says, back in the early 1990s, pre-"Friends," when she was a member of the improv troupe the Groundlings in L.A. "Truth is that I created this character in a three-minute monologue sketch called Favorite Actress on a Talk Show. You know, so phony, so self-promoting. Talking about her favorite causes, the environment, that ego out of control." Here, Kudrow becomes Valerie on Leno. "Okay, so save the planet, please, as a favor to me." Beat. "I'll love ya for it!"
Patrick Bristow, now a director and teacher at the Groundlings, was a student and then a cast member with Kudrow in the troupe in the early 1990s. She wasn't as polished then, but "everyone knew she was the one who was going to pop," and break out into TV and film, as did former Groundling alums Will Ferrell, Phil Hartman and Chris Kattan.
"She had this velvety, dry delivery," Bristow recalls, and she also was developing a way to do comedy that hid as much as it revealed, so that the audience leans in and feels this discomforting embarrassment for the character, and then gets a release when she delivers the joke. "Those uncomfortable silences, it's almost too much, but you're just waiting to hear what comes next," Bristow says. (And in that style, many have compared Kudrow's long, uncomfortable pauses on "The Comeback" to the technique used on the BBC and now NBC versions of "The Office.")
Whatever a viewer might make of "The Comeback," the social satire has in its cross hairs two intertwined pop culture targets: the network sitcom, which Kudrow believes is dying, and reality TV, which is competing with the traditional and stale sitcom-form and, more ominously, degrading society, she says. This is not an entirely fresh critique. But it is compelling, coming from someone so on the inside, biting the hand that fed her.
"It's really hard, almost impossibly hard, especially when the shows get shorter and shorter," Kudrow says of today's sitcoms. Many 30-minute programs have now been reduced to less than 20 minutes of actual comedy -- the other 10 minutes consumed by advertisements. "And you need some moments that an actor can take so that they can ground a character. So it can't just be setup, joke, setup, joke, like laying pipe. I think that's one of the problems. So desperate for success." Does she include her former co-star Matt LeBlanc, now starring in the "Friends" spinoff "Joey," in that assessment? She says she does not. And so we politely move on.
Kudrow understands TV is a business chasing eyeballs. But she thinks, too, that the days of broadcast might be numbered, that it all might be heading for a pay-per-view world.
The flip side of the sitcom, Kudrow says, is reality television. On "The Comeback," she says, "The setting for Valerie is reality TV because it all went together: someone who is willing to sell herself out completely and entirely. Reality TV was made for her. She is such a willing participant in her own demise. But to watch her on a new sitcom, there's just no room for her, because audiences are getting younger and younger, and they need to appeal to audiences. . . . That's the world. A desperate woman in a desperate world."
It can feel kind of scary, Kudrow says, the extent the reality shows and contestants will go to. "Andy Warhol? You know? We're way beyond that. Everyone is entitled and demanding and insisting on their 15 minutes of fame, and they don't care what for. Everyone can be famous now. For what, I don't know."
A lot of talk about desperation here, from a comedic actress, no? Kudrow says she never planned to make it her life's work to play the brainless. Before success, "my characters weren't dumb blond girls. It wasn't my strength. But for auditions, a cold reading, when you have to make a quick choice, one that's comedic . . . " she says. "You find a twist, and dumb is always easy." Any regrets? "I'm fine," she says, "really," and gives a squint, to show, you know, it's okay that she is now fabulously wealthy beyond anyone's dreams. No harm done.
But there is something in her latest roles that shows a different actress stirring beneath Phoebe Buffay. In "The Comeback," Kudrow is over-the-top, all id, but there is this vulnerability. In "Happy Endings," the movie, she plays Mamie, a woman in her late thirties (Kudrow is actually 41) who channels twitch and tension, who sees in life something about to bite her on the ankle.
The Roos film is an indie-style, arty, talky ensemble piece, shot in L.A. in a quick 30 days on a tight budget, with four overlapping story lines -- a hard film to market. Kudrow's character seeks a son she gave up for adoption when she was a teenager, a son sired by her stepbrother (Steve Coogan), who turns out later to be gay and is experiencing problems with his boyfriend and their lesbian couple friends, one of them played by Laura Dern, who is, you know, indie royalty. They're joined by Tom Arnold, who plays a rich sugar-daddy with a good heart, who has a quickie with Maggie Gyllenhall (more indie cred; recall "The Secretary"?), a scammer and lounge singer. And then there's Bobby Cannavale, who plays Kudrow's love interest and is the masseur who gives bored Beverly Hills trophy wife-types their "happy endings" on the massage tables for $175 a session, plus tip. Oh, and there is another show-within-a-show, in this case a bad student documentary.
The film is a comedy but it manages to be sad. The director, Roos, says he wrote the Mamie role with Kudrow in mind. "I don't think there's a better actress working today," Roos says, and compares her to Gwyneth Paltrow. Reckless praise? Roos says no.
"What Lisa can do -- show pain, but then hide it behind her mask -- but it bleeds out. And then she does that and she can make it funny." A kind of triple back flip. "Because you have the sense you not only know what the character is feeling, but what she is thinking, what's going on between her ears."
Kudrow says it's the cracks. "He liked that. That the camera captures those moments when you're thrown by what's happening to you, and you think you recover quickly enough so the viewer doesn't notice, but they always do. It works with comedy. That moment when someone is exposed and covers it up is what's funny. It works the same with tragedy. The covering-up," she says. "I think that's universal, don't you?"
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