On the set of The Comeback in early July, the sun was going down, and the rush-hour traffic on the nearby 101 freeway was beginning to abate. It was the second-to-last day of shooting after a harried six-week schedule. During their dinner break, the people behind the HBO comedy ate in a craft services tent set up outside of the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Universal City, California — and soon into the meal, the conversation turned to Bravo's Real Housewives franchise. Comeback co-creators Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow (also the star), executive producer and guest star Dan Bucatinsky, and Amy B. Harris, a co-executive producer and a writing alumna of the show's first incarnation, were all drawn to or repelled by the Housewives — or both, of course.
"It will be interesting," King said as the group catalogued the casts' many tragedies and indignities, "to see how people respond to Valerie now that the world is rougher."
Kudrow as Valerie Cherish — with Malin Akerman — in Season 1 of "The Comeback."
HBO
"Valerie" is Valerie Cherish, first portrayed by Kudrow in 2005 in The Comeback's 13-episode single (until now) season. A sitcom actress whose never-that-bright stardom had further dimmed in her forties, Cherish sought to make her television return as Aunt Sassy, a wacky, sex-starved side character on a crappy network sitcom called Room and Bored. Simultaneously, Cherish was followed by a reality-show production that captured every agonizing detail of her work and home life. The Comeback was presented as the "raw footage" of the reality show, also called The Comeback. Though it seemed improvised, it was entirely scripted by King (who had just finished running Sex and the City for HBO as an executive producer), Kudrow (who had recently completed 10 years as Phoebe Buffay on Friends), and a staff of writers. Kudrow's Valerie — a spotlight-craving, self-conscious, controlling, hysterically optimistic, hardworking, red-haired open wound — was never shown outside of the camera's punishing frame.
There were a few exceptions among television critics — in a rave in the Washington Post, Tom Shales called The Comeback a "shrewd satire" that "teeters on wonderful" — but on the whole, the show was not well-reviewed. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette called it "something you want to look away from"; the San Francisco Chronicle said the show "appears to be taking its cues from Curb Your Enthusiasm — minus all the humor"; and in the New York Times, Alessandra Stanley wrote, "The Comeback is interesting, but Entourage is a more charming comedy: The missteps of actors on the way up are less painful to watch than the graceless freefall of actresses on the way down."
And so on.
Even worse for the show's fate, it premiered during HBO's dark period, when the previously invincible premium channel stumbled in its programming — with the short-lived Carnivàle, K Street, and Unscripted seen as symptoms of a larger problem. Upstarts like FX sensed HBO's weakness and pounced, stealing its playbook and taunting its failings in the press. The Comeback, which struggled to find a large audience in its debut season in the summer of 2005, ended up a casualty of this riptide, and was canceled.
HBO
But a lot has changed in nine years. As well as the fact that, in King's assessment, we're now used to roughness, pop culture has splintered completely and permanently. Fans of shows that may have been underappreciated during their runs entice new audiences through YouTube tributes and Tumblr GIFs. And the character of Valerie is so eminently GIF-ready — with catchphrases such as "I don't want to see that!" and "Hello, hello, hello!" and her signature gesture of, as King calls it, "yoga blessing hands" — that The Comeback's cult has since become practically mainstream. Viewed easily in its entirety on HBO Go or Amazon Prime (or through illegal means), The Comeback has a whole new audience. It's often seen in hindsight as at least prophetic, if not brilliant.
When writing about the Veronica Mars movie’s successful Kickstarter campaign last year, Robert Lloyd of the Los Angeles Times coined the phrase "a way paved with love" as "a new route to Making Things Happen." As unlikely as it seems, in other words, a key part of the entertainment business these days is realizing what properties evoke strong emotions, affection, and, yes, love. And that is the world in which HBO has revived The Comeback for eight episodes — either as a "limited series," or as a whole new beginning — which begin airing on Nov. 9 at 10 p.m.
"We're humans as well," said Michael Lombardo, HBO's president of programming, in a telephone interview. "We respond to shows as fans as well as executives. And when things stick with you, you can't deny that."
"The poetic thing to me about The Comeback is that the kind of idealism that Valerie Cherish possesses in her soul — which I find admirable, no matter how many hits she takes — is an optimism that we have actually seen play out for us in real life," Bucatinsky said over breakfast in October. "I hate to sound cheesy and soapy and treacly. But why let any of your aspirations or passion projects or dreams die, when you don't know? You don't know! That five years later or six years later or nine years later, you could come back. You could come back!"
During a long lunch recently, Kudrow put it this way: "For a while, I felt so cheated out of getting to do what I thought was the best work I'd ever done. All the little stories, all the little things we were going to be able to explore that would be fun for everyone."
"But!" she said in her Kudrowian cadence, in which she hits unexpected words with emphasis. "We get to do it now."
Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King in Los Angeles in October 2014.
Photograph by Macey J. Foronda for BuzzFeed
Kudrow and King first met in the early '90s, when Kudrow was in the comedy group The Groundlings with Jonathan Stark, who later won an Emmy for co-writing the episode of Ellen in which Ellen DeGeneres' character comes out. Stark was also friends with King, an actor, comedian, and writer. Before Kudrow was introduced to King, Stark showed her King's headshot, which King had altered to make his chin look "freakishly small" as a joke. "Is he OK?" she remembered asking.
And King saw Kudrow in a Groundlings sketch in which she played Audrey Hepburn on a hick fishing TV show. "Which is funny, because Lisa doesn't do impressions — she does an essence," King said during a recent interview in his office at Warner Bros. "It was sort of not Audrey Hepburn at all, and exactly Audrey Hepburn. I just remember thinking, What?!"
Kudrow as Ursula on "Mad About You".
Alice S. Hall / NBC / Getty Images
Soon enough, they were friendly acquaintances. And several years later, they began a pattern of happily running into each other. First, on the Culver Studios lot, where Kudrow was a recurring guest star on Mad About You (playing Ursula, the character who eventually led to Friends) and King was running the ill-fated sitcom Good Advice ("Shelley Long had a mental collapse in the middle of the series," he said). Later, they would catch up at awards shows where Friends and Sex and the City battled in the same categories. "Why are you talking to someone from that table?" Kudrow said her Friends compatriots would ask her. "It's not that kind of competition!"
"Friends"
Warner Bros/ Everett Collection
Friends and Sex and the City ended within a few months of each other in 2004. By that time, Kudrow and King had the same agents, who suggested the two have lunch. They gladly agreed, but both were clear that they didn’t have any desire to launch immediately into another half-hour comedy — Kudrow, who'd had success in movies during Friends with The Opposite of Sex and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion, wanted to focus on a film career. But during the lunch with King, Kudrow mentioned that, yes, there was one thing she wanted to do — eventually — which was to create a story around a Groundlings character she used to do that she called Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show. The character didn't have a name yet, but she did have a voice: Valerie's pinched, geographically muddled singsong, in which everything is said through a frozen smile.
The way Kudrow described her to King, the character had the "entry-level narcissism of Valerie," King said. She was, Kudrow said, the sort of "self-obsessed person" who goes on a talk show and "throws out some cause because she had to." In Valerie's voice, Kudrow gave an example. "The planet — let's save the planet. You could tell she didn't really know what that meant. Everyone, please save the planet as a favor to me — I'll love you for it."
They improvised and talked it through for three hours, getting increasingly excited. One problem, King thought, was that no one would care about an actress. But as they added layers to the character, and after King came up with the reality show conceit —because, post-Survivor, reality was taking over network television — he got past his hesitation. "He thought it was a show within a show within a show about a show," Kudrow said. "'Wow, it's like an Escher drawing — wow.'" After another three-hour meeting, King told her that they had a full season's worth of material. And they decided to go to HBO with it.
Kudrow and King on the set of "The Comeback."
HBO
Looking back, some of the obstacles that were soon to hinder The Comeback were apparent right away, like the fact that the show was hard to describe. Bucatinsky, who is Kudrow's producing partner, recalled selling the idea to HBO's then-entertainment president, Carolyn Strauss. "I mean, it wasn't unpitchable. They did great — Lisa was improvising in the room," Bucatinsky said. "But how do you picture this? How do you possibly picture The Comeback? You can't. It's in the execution. There was a level of trust in Lisa, and confidence in Michael, that allowed them to say, 'Yeah, go write the script.'"
But even with the pilot script, written by King and Kudrow, HBO had to continue taking a leap of faith. "It doesn't read hilarious," Kudrow said. "At all. There are no jokes." It was only as they began to audition other actors that HBO executives got to see what the show's tone would be. Kudrow said they seemed relieved: "'Oh my god, this is funny. She's funny!'"
Season 1 of "The Comeback."
HBO
In The Comeback, Valerie was surrounded all the time by the many people in her real life: her loving husband (Damian Young), Mark, a rich businessman; her fawning best friend/hairstylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris); Room and Bored's hot, vapid young cast (including Malin Akerman and Kellan Lutz in their first attention-getting roles); and the show's creators, Tom (Robert Bagnell) and Paulie G. (Lance Barber), the latter of whom inexplicably despised her. Then there were the reality production crew, who were mostly off-camera, but were constantly addressed by Valerie — especially the producer, Jane (Laura Silverman), who became Valerie's projection screen, object of harassment, manipulator, and sympathizer.
Model mouth in Season 1.
HBO
Emotionally, it proved to be an incredibly complicated show. There were long and uncomfortable silences. On one level, you were invited to laugh at Valerie — at her '80s hair (Kudrow wore a wig), her repeated verbal tics ("Jane! Jane!"), her selfishness (she couldn't remember the names of anyone of a lower station), and her near-constant abasements (she was treated at Room and Bored like a non-person in an absurd tracksuit). "Even though she was gorgeous, they would see her as an aunt and put her in a tracksuit," King said. "Because that's what would happen if you were with 20-year-old girls. It was all about knocking her down as much as possible."
But there was so much more to Valerie and The Comeback. As a character study, it showed her torn between what she had — a husband who adored her, a lovely house in Brentwood, and a ton of money — and what she yearned for from the fame machine: attention from strangers, good placement in Us Weekly, and work as an actress so she could get attention from strangers and good placement in Us Weekly. With every indignity the secretly smart Valerie endured, Kudrow would catch the camera's eye straight on, mortified to see it capture her suffering, until she mustered the wherewithal to cover up her pain a half-second later.
"We wanted her to be as complex as people are," Kudrow said. "What's funny about it is this person thinking they're really good at controlling everything. Just on every level. It's like, You can't even control your own face, and you want to control a reality show producer. Oh my god."
Yet she did have some victories too. In one breakthrough, while being filmed at the end of a trying Palm Springs weekend, a hungover Valerie told Jane she would pay out of her pocket for the music rights to "I Want You to Want Me" by Cheap Trick herself so she and Mark could listen to it in peace; in the same scene, after an irritating product-placement person said to them one too many times to mention the name of the SUV they're driving, she told him, "I swear to god, I will pull over and put you out onto the side of the road."
After that episode aired — the eighth of the season — King said they went to HBO and said, "Pick us up now for next season. It's turning, I can feel the tide turning." King, who as a former performer is good at re-enacting past events, summoned the intensity he said he felt then. "I started to feel people now got it. When they saw that Valerie was strong and the Terminator, and she wasn't a weak woman who was going to be destroyed by this, they started to get into her journey."
There had been, perhaps, a tragic misunderstanding: that a show created by the woman who played Phoebe on Friends and the man who had shepherded Sex and the City to its heights would be, as King put it, "Phoebe in Manolos." Or, alternatively, that Kudrow would be playing a fictional version of herself skewering Friends. "I know it's not me at all," she assured herself then.
Photograph by Macey J. Foronda for BuzzFeed
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