Lisa Kudrow was a galactically famous star coming off the final year of Friends when The Comeback, her HBO cringe comedy, debuted in 2005.
In that context, her portrayal of a washed-up Hollywood sitcom actor – Kudrow’s brittle alter ego, Valerie Cherish – desperately clinging to the last vestiges of fame hit hard. Shot in an unflinching faux-documentary style, the bleak series felt like Kudrow’s way of purging Phoebe from her system.
The Comeback was too grim for Friends fans, and it was cancelled after a single season. It has gone on to gain a cult following, however, leading HBO to bring it back in 2014 and now, again, for one final run of episodes (Sky Comedy, Monday).
Cherish is still an egotistical mess – vain, insecure and needy – but Kudrow is clearly fond of the character and at pains never to turn her into a monster. She deserves our pity, not our hate.
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The comedy is still of the black-coffee-no-sugar variety. Now in her early 60s (Kudrow is 62), Valerie continues to believe she can reclaim her days of sitcom megacelebrity. (There are echoes of BoJack Horseman, Netflix’s equally dark animated Hollywood satire.)
But while her talents remain big (in her mind), the world keeps getting smaller.
She walks off a production of Chicago after discovering it’s harder to perform in the musical than to watch the movie version at home, then tries to use the Hollywood actors’ strike to boost her profile. Plus there’s her podcast, Cherish the Times, where she bashes out banter under the withering gaze of her bored producer (Ella Stiller, daughter of Ben).
None of this sticks, but there is one final opportunity: a new sitcom from an obscurish streaming platform, in which she would be the star. The catch? The script is to be written by AI – meaning Valerie will in all likelihood become a pariah in Tinseltown if she signs on. Still, a gig’s a gig. What’s a sitcom icon to do?
The Comeback’s final season lands a year after The Studio, Seth Rogen’s acclaimed parody of the Hollywood dream factory, and the two shows present a study in contrasts. For all its shuffling-deckchairs-on-the-Titanic humour, The Studio believed in the magic of cinema, and it wanted the audience to share that love. The Comeback, by comparison, is giddily nihilistic: it is a black comedy where the darkness leaves more of an impression than the gags.
That said, it is also a wonderful vehicle for Kudrow, who was always the most instinctively funny of the Friends cast (reflecting her time with the Groundlings, the Los Angeles-based sketch-comedy troupe).
Valerie remains one of the great cringe-comedy creations this side of David Brent, from The Office, or Larry David’s alter ego in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and it’s a testament to Kudrow that she makes the character likable rather than simply loathsome.
There will never be another Friends – and even if there were, there’d be every chance nobody that would watch or even notice it was on. But Kudrow is still one of the funniest actors of her generation. The Comeback reminds us that her talents didn’t end with Phoebe Buffay.
