Countdown to The Comeback! Lisa Kudrow Talks About Her Return to HBO
In a move that she never suspected would happen, Lisa Kudrow is returning to HBO on Sunday with a brand new season of “The Comeback”. Her series that she co-created with executive producer and writer Michael Patrick King, ran for one 13 episode season on HBO in 2005 before it was cancelled. Kudrow starred as the former TV “It Girl” Valerie Cherish who thought she could revive her former fame by taking a role on a new sitcom and letting reality television document all of it. She was wrong.
Lisa Kudrow was beyond surprised when HBO invited her and Michael Patrick King in for a meeting and asked about bringing back “The Comeback”. She said, “The next thing I remember is waiting for the car in valet parking and Michael and I were just staring at each other, almost about to cry, saying, ‘This doesn’t happen, this is fantastic. What just happened?’ We’re so lucky we get to do more.”
The next challenge for Kudrow and King, from a writing standpoint, was to try to find Valerie Cherish’s voice after 10 years of being gone. As the two started putting the ideas for the new season together, Kudrow kept asking herself, “Is this her? Is this her?” She said they were finally able to find the optimism inside the character so desperate for fame that made the character of Valerie Cherish so special in the first place.
Several of the original cast members are coming back to the new season of “The Comeback” including Robert Michael Morris, Laura Silverman, Damian Young, Malin Akerman and Lance Barber as Paulie G., Valerie Cherish’s screenwriting nemesis who ends up working with her again in the series.
Lisa Kudrow said plans were put in motion to get as many cast members back as possible. “We were still writing the episodes when people started discovering that there was going to be more of ‘The Comeback’. Initially we reached out to some people, and then we were hearing from others. We knew we wouldn’t be able to have them all in every episode, but we were hearing people say, ‘I want to be part of it.’ So we moved our production schedules around, and they moved their immovable schedules around to make it work. It was great.”
King and Kudrow knew that they had to remember that 10 years had passed for all of the “Comeback” characters involved in the series, not just Valerie.
“I think they all believe they’ve evolved, even Paulie G. They’re all trying. They haven’t been tested yet, but ‘Seeing Red’ is going to test everyone. Being on an HBO show is going to test them all. Everyone thinks their priorities are straight, although I’m not sure Valerie ever says her priorities have changed, so that’s pretty honest.”
Lisa Kudrow said that part of the amazing experience of the first run of “The Comeback” was how people stayed connected with the show and a new generation of viewers became fans. “The thing that really surprised me and made me so happy, but also made all the sense in the world, was that younger people were loving the show. Younger people grew up with reality shows, so they had the ‘Real Housewives of Everywhere’ already, they had people behaving really poorly on TV already. But when we first did the series, that was still new, and may have been too tough for people to take then. We really didn’t have a point of reference for a woman who would be so humiliated. Now they do it all the time.”
Lisa Kudrow summed up her feelings on getting to play one of television’s most unique and fascinating characters one more time. She said, “Just getting to be Valerie again, because it is fun to be someone who just won’t accept the negative things. That is fun.”
Here’s some clips from the return of “The Comeback”, back on HBO starting Sunday, November 9th at 10 pm et.
