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After the hugely successful 10-year run of arguably the most popular sitcom of all time, Friends star Lisa Kudrow wasn’t looking to commit to another long-running show.
Revisiting a character she had originally created before her time on Friends, Kudrow decided to forge ahead and bring Valerie Cherish to television in her own show, The Comeback. Valerie couldn’t be more different from Kudrow’s Friends’ character Phoebe Buffay, and shows a completely different side to her acting abilities
The Comeback focuses on washed-up sitcom actress Valerie (Kudrow), who isn’t quite ready to give up on her fame. The format is unique in that it is presented like found footage of a reality show, which helps to give quite an unconventional look at this character, played so brilliantly by Kudrow. As Valerie, she displays a heightened level of complexity and depth that wasn’t previously available to her with Phoebe. Valerie Cherish and The Comeback is what really solidified Lisa Kudrow as a comedic genius, even after a decade of being beloved on Friends.
How ‘The Comeback’ Came About After ‘Friends’
The Comeback was the perfect post-Friends project to showcase Lisa Kudrow’s full range of talent. Once Friends had ended, she was mulling over what her next project could be. Over a lunch meeting with Michael Patrick King, who had just finished his run working on Sex and the City, the two discussed what Kudrow would want to do now that she wasn’t committed to multiple seasons of network television for years to come. She’d created a character similar to Valerie Cherish in the years before she found sitcom fame, and together, the two discussed how to bring this character to life for television.
Kudrow had first created this character while training with The Groundlings improv troupe in LA. “We would do these character monologues,” she says. “I had one called ‘Your favorite actress on a talk show’ – I didn’t even give her a name.” At the time that King and Kudrow were discussing bringing Valerie Cherish to television, it was the dawn of the reality TV era. Taking inspiration from some of the cringeworthy things the pair witnessed from that medium, King and Kudrow came up with The Comeback’s structure, pairing the old-fashioned sitcom actress with the new and humiliating format of reality TV.
As a has-been actor who starred in a late 80s / early 90s sitcom, Valerie is so desperate to find fame again, she agrees to play a grumpy old aunt in a bit of a nothing sitcom, Room and Bored, starring hot young actors. She also agrees to star in a reality show which documents her television comeback. The Comeback is then packaged as the found footage of this reality show about this sitcom star. The show itself is a satire on both the state of television and fame. The Comeback found its home on HBO and its first season aired in 2005.
Will There Even Be a Third Season of ‘The Comeback’?
For a show that is so revered, it’s amazing that The Comeback only has two seasons to its name. When the first season aired in 2005, it had decent viewership, but not enough for HBO to renew it for further seasons. Over time and through word-of-mouth, the show became a sleeper hit, and a second season aired in 2014.
The second season of the show came nearly 10 years after the first, and somewhat changed its premise. Instead of trying to make her comeback in a sitcom, a dramatization of Valerie’s time on Room and Bored, called Seeing Red, is being made for HBO, and again, another reality show documents this production and Valerie’s role in it. Amidst all of the genre-bending and mashup ideas, the real heart of The Comeback is just Valerie Cherish.
‘The Comeback’s Valerie Cherish Is the Anti-Phoebe
Friends was a traditional sitcom with straightforward humor, while The Comeback uses cringe comedy, allowing Kudrow to be much less happy all of the time, and to depict an underlying sadness that Valerie has. Whereas Friends was driven by jokes, the humor in The Comeback is driven by situations and Kudrow’s reactions. It also doesn’t have to be funny with every line like Friends, so it is given a chance to display an array of tones and emotions.
Phoebe always had a go-with-the-flow attitude, whereas Valerie has an air of desperation about her as she struggles to remain relevant. As she attempts her acting comeback on a second-rate sitcom, she tries to save face for the cameras, buries her disappointment and hurt, and it all comes bubbling up to fester just underneath the surface. She’s both superficially fake and painfully vulnerable at the same time.
Phoebe was very one-note throughout her tenure on Friends, whereas Valerie shows a wide range of emotions and layers — she often finds herself excluded, the butt of the joke, or not really as beloved as she delusionally believes herself to be. Phoebe is somewhat perfect and unbothered, but Valerie is so flawed and so bothered by it. Valerie experiences sexism, ageism, and plain old Hollywood cruelty, but she still perseveres. It’s a much darker role for Kudrow to have taken on after a decade on Friends.
There weren’t any true malicious villains in Friends, but The Comeback has its own in sitcom writer Paulie G (Lance Barber), who was a horrible bully to Valerie when they worked together. Looking back now through a “Me Too” lens, it does play differently and acts as a commentary on the misogyny of the industry. Kudrow as Valerie plays her responses to Paulie’s behavior in such a complex way — not wanting to take it at face value, being hurt by it, or rising up despite it. There is some humor in her struggle against Paulie, as well as a lot of empathy. She is a nuanced character in a nuanced situation, and not at all the happy-go-lucky character we saw in the more light-hearted world of Friends.
Lisa Kudrow plays Valerie Cherish with pathos, sincerity, hilarity, kindness, vanity, and, of course, cringe. The role of a lifetime, Valerie shows a side to Kudrow’s talent that ten years as Phoebe on Friends didn’t even skim the surface of. It’s been another decade since its last season aired, and it feels time for The Comeback to, once again, come back.
