http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/arts/television/lisa-kudrow-returns-in-the-comeback-on-hbo.html 2014-10-31 13:54:58 Lisa Kudrow Returns in ‘The Comeback’ on HBO “The Comeback” only ran for one season in 2005, despite Emmy nominations. But now Lisa Kudrow is bringing it back, with its cast intact. === WEST HOLLYWOOD — In 2005, HBO aired a series called “ “People made an effort to find it,” said Ms. Kudrow, who created the show with Michael Patrick King. “A lot of writers, artists, people I respect, would say to me: ‘It’s crazy that it didn’t get picked up. It must have been a mistake.’ ” The show even ended up on Entertainment Weekly’s “10 Best TV Shows of the Decade” list. But it’s now a television world in which Netflix restarts an offbeat but canceled broadcast sitcom (“Arrested Development”) and Fox reverses a cancellation to create a limited series (“24”). And so, nearly a decade after Season 1, “The Comeback” is itself making a comeback, getting an eight-episode Season 2 that starts next Sunday. When Ms. Kudrow and Mr. King were called in for a meeting this year at HBO, the network’s president for programming, Michael Lombardo, told the pair, “I miss Valerie,” and asked if they knew of a way to bring back the show. “Within two or three minutes, it was clear that this was an idea that was meant to happen,” Mr. Lombardo said. “It was as if they’d been thinking about it for the last year.” Afterward, Ms. Kudrow said, she and Mr. King were in a daze as they headed to the parking lot. “We were sort of staring at each other with tears in our eyes, like happy ones, going, ‘What just happened?’ ” Ms. Kudrow said. Mr. King remembered: “We hugged for a really long time. And we’re not effusive people.” Once the miracle of resurrection wore off, the reality sunk in. Ms. Kudrow’s days are filled working as an executive producer of the TLC genealogy series, “ When the HBO show returns, viewers will find that Valerie has adjusted to a more modern-day form of celebrity. “We start off with her perfectly accepting that being famous for being famous is a valid, legitimate career,” said Ms. Kudrow, suddenly assuming Valerie’s erect posture and shiny down-home twang. “That’s how it is now.” She added, in her normal voice: “Then she stumbles into a real acting job. I loved that.” Over the next hour or so, as she morphed in and out of Valerie, it became obvious that her fictional counterpart has long lived inside her. The Vassar-educated Ms. Kudrow, 51, first discovered the seeds of the character back in the late ’80s while studying improvisation at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. Back then, Valerie was a nameless luminary in a monologue of Ms. Kudrow’s called “Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show,” which shared Valerie’s exaggerated sense of her sway over the public. “She’d say things like: ‘I’m really interested in the environment. So people, please, please, please, let’s save the planet. Do it as a favor to me.’ ” “The Comeback” came about when Mr. King and Ms. Kudrow, at the suggestion of their agency, met for a brainstorming lunch. Ms. Kudrow summoned her old Groundlings character. By the time the check arrived, a detailed season outline had been drawn, and a series had been born. “The Comeback” debuted to mixed reviews. (Writing in The New York Times, Alessandra Stanley called it “the In hindsight, Mr. King said, perhaps the pedigrees of the show’s creators — he was an executive producer on “Sex and the City” and she had a decade-long run as Phoebe Buffay on “Friends” — added to the confusion. “Everybody was expecting to see Phoebe in Manohlos,” he said. “Instead, it was about this painfully raw woman asking for approval.” Ms. Kudrow said about a year and a half passed before she felt the sting of HBO’s decision. “There’s a part of me that feels like it has to be something that merits that kind of mourning,” she said with a shrug. “It’s just work. It wasn’t a child. It wasn’t my marriage. There’s a part of me that’s like Valerie Cherish, which is that if something negative doesn’t serve me, I ignore it. I knew what we did was really good.” When she said this, Ms. Kudrow, looking nondescript in large black eyeglasses and shoulder-length blond hair, was sitting in an Italian restaurant in West Hollywood she picked for its walking proximity to her production company office. A few seats away, Steve Martin was eating lunch alone, and the booming voice of the director William Friedkin rose over the din. It wasn’t hard to imagine what Valerie Cherish would do in a such a situation: aggressively table-hop, whether her targets knew her or not. Because acting is a field filled with people with bulletproof smiles and limitless ambition, the show has gotten her colleagues thinking: Am I the model for Valerie Cherish? “I’ve had people ask me that, I mean, people I’ve never met before,” Ms. Kudrow said, adding that the character is a composite of bits and pieces stolen from many. The reason “The Comeback” can be so cringe inducing, she added, is that it’s easy to relate to Valerie’s willingness to trade in her dignity in the hopes of advancing her career. “Every actor has behaved worse than that,” she said. “I’ve had some of those same thoughts. Then the front part of my brain says, ‘Don’t say that.’ But if you want to get somewhere, there are different degrees of what you’re going to put up with or compromise.” Much like the first season of “The Comeback,” Season 2 has no laugh track, is shot to look like the unedited footage of a reality crew and brings back many of same characters — Valerie’s wealthy husband (Damian Young), her hairdresser-sidekick (Robert Michael Morris), a truculent show runner (Lance Barber) and a deadpan reality television producer (Laura Silverman). Asked about the possibility of a Season 3, Mr. Lombardo said, “I would figure it out in a heartbeat.” Season 2 offers Ms. Kudrow the chance to suggest that almost a decade later, Valerie has wised up, albeit subtly. “Lisa is always sending out a real vivid, complicated mix of many things,” Mr. King said, describing Ms. Kudrow’s ability to convey a dozen emotions at once. “Valerie isn’t dumb, and she knows what’s happening to her. She’s spinning, saving herself, getting out. She’s always aware. She’s a beautifully realized sad, tragic clown.”