It\u2019s hard to remember now, given its 20-year status as an enduring cult classic, but after its first season, Lisa Kudrow\u2019s series The Comeback was chalked up as yet another post-Friends flop.<\/p>\n
The series premiered in June 2005, barely a year after Friends went off the air, and was part of an early noughties slew of short-lived TV projects by members of the cast \u2013 Matt LeBlanc\u2019s spin-off Joey, Matthew Perry\u2019s Studio 60 at the Sunset Strip, Courteney Cox\u2019s Dirt \u2013 trying to carve out a post-Friends TV career but not finding anything that stuck.<\/p>\n
The Comeback had the briefest run of them all: One 13-episode season, met with decidedly mixed reviews before being quietly cancelled.<\/p>\n
Then something unusual happened. The show \u2013 a high-concept mockumentary following washed-up TV actress Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) as reality TV cameras follow her latest attempt at a career comeback \u2013 gained a real following in the years after its cancellation. Kudrow\u2019s hilariously layered performance as woman hoping to find reality TV fame while keeping her dignity (an impossible task) rewarded repeat viewings. <\/p>\n
To say that first season was ahead of its time was an understatement: A rich, glamorous but underemployed LA housewife, keen to debase herself on camera for just one more taste at fame? Incredibly, this was a year before the Real Housewives franchise even premiered (and watch Paula Abdul\u2019s 2007 car crash of a reality show Hey Paula to see just how prescient The Comeback really was \u2013 it could serve as a long-lost extra season).<\/p>\n
Almost a decade later, the groundswell of support for the show \u2013 by then retrospectively considered a comedy classic \u2013 had grown so much that HBO finally picked up a second season. During that 2014 return, Valerie scored some much-needed career wins \u2013 earning an Emmy after a star turn on a dark dramedy series \u2013 but they came at the expense of her personal life, as her obsession with fame threatened to swallow her whole. <\/p>\n
And now, 12 years on, The Comeback returns for a third (and, Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King insist, final) season. <\/p>\n
This time, Valerie\u2019s back on-air in her favourite format, a crowd-pleasing sitcom, but with one key difference: It\u2019s the first show to be written by AI. Many actors would baulk at the concept; Val\u2019s just happy to be working. <\/p>\n
Speaking at an LA press conference last week before the new season premieres today, Kudrow described The Comeback as \u201cthe best thing\u201d she\u2019s ever done and said she was thrilled to return to the role of Valerie Cherish more than 20 years after the show debuted. <\/p>\n
\u201cJust as reality TV felt like an almost extinction event, at the time, for scripted television, it\u2019s the same feeling now about AI,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
She said it had been a particular joy to revisit her favourite character roughly every decade or so. This time around, we find Valerie with \u201cslightly more confidence, but still the desperation, because she hasn\u2019t worked. So you know, she\u2019s been adrift for a few years when we meet her again \u2026 which is right where we want her,\u201d Kudrow laughs. <\/p>\n
Part of the fun of The Comeback \u2013 and the genius of its once a decade release schedule \u2013 is seeing how Valerie has tried to stay relevant amid the changing tides of Hollywood.<\/p>\n
In season two she had a disastrous try-out to be one of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills; her pathological conflict avoidance made her the worst possible candidate for the job. <\/p>\n
This time around, she has an equally ill-fated attempt to be stunt cast into the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago. <\/p>\n
And like seemingly every other Hollywood actor, she has her own podcast, where she struggles to fill the dead air talking about what she watched on TV last night.<\/p>\n
This season ups the celeb ante too: Jane Fonda and Andrew Scott pop up for hilarious cameos, while John Early and Abbi Jacobson are great as the exhausted, permanently enraged co-writers of Val\u2019s AI sitcom, just trying to cash one last paycheque before Hollywood implodes.<\/p>\n
Of course, Valerie doesn\u2019t share their pessimism about the state of the industry. Despite the many obstacles in her way, she never gives up \u2013 and once again, Kudrow proves Cherish is her greatest comic creation. <\/p>\n
Val got her Emmy win last season \u2013 let\u2019s hope with season three, Kudrow earns another Emmy of her own to mark The Comeback\u2019s swansong. <\/p>\n
The first episode of The Comeback season 3 streams on HBO Max from today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s hard to remember now, given its 20-year status as an enduring cult classic, but after its first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[458,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-353108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}