It’s been 20 years since Valerie Cherish booked “The Comeback.”
“The Comeback,” the HBO satire of reality TV and the entertainment industry — a show that confused audiences in its moment but is now a revered cult classic — debuted June 5, 2005. It came with lofty expectations attached: The series was a collaboration between Lisa Kudrow, of “Friends,” and Michael Patrick King, who’d run “Sex and the City.” Both of those shows’ sentimental and sweet-natured finales, both of which had aired in the previous year, loomed large in memory.
But “The Comeback” was more acidic than either; it depicts Valerie, a TV actress from yesteryear, who has the opportunity to appear on a new sitcom, but only if she also agrees to star in a reality show about her climb back from Hollywood oblivion. Over the course of its first season, “The Comeback” emerged as, at once, a tactical dissection of an industry in transition and a character study that purposefully blurred genre lines. Valerie often allowed her vanity and delusion to stand in her way, but also has a certain purity in her desire for mainstream success; viewers on the show’s wavelength might alternately cringe, laugh and feel deeply for her over the course of just a few minutes.
After its first-season finale, in which Valerie achieves celebrity after having utterly humiliated herself on reality TV, the series was put on ice, canceled after Kudrow and King lost their respective Emmy races for acting and directing. The show’s reputation grew over time, though, as more viewers discovered its tricky tonal mix on DVD and streaming and as early, confused critical reactions faded from memory. In 2014, “The Comeback” returned for a revival season, in which Valerie, still chasing fame, attempts to sell Andy Cohen a pilot only to be drawn into “difficult man”-centered prestige cable, a world in which she fits even less well than reality TV.
In an interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of “The Comeback,” King and Kudrow tell Variety that they’re always looking for a good idea for a prospective Season 3. The reason Valerie is so endlessly renewable, King says, is that in her quest for fame and respect, she is perennially frustrated. “Valerie,” King says, “will never get everything she wants.” But for 20 years, a growing audience has loved watching her try.
We’re now further away from Season 1 of “The Comeback” than Valerie is from “I’m It.”
Michael Patrick King: That’s some complicated “Comeback” math.
That’s just to say that the TV landscape has changed a lot since the first season. Do you think a show like this could get made today?
King: We did a seminar at SXSW a couple of years ago, and everybody was walking around pushing their show so hard — there were free waters with people’s shows’ names on them. And I went, Oh my God — all of television is as desperate as Valerie was. Everybody has to fight so hard to get seen. Could it happen now? It could barely happen then.
Lisa Kudrow: It barely happened.
And you pulled it over the line by force of will?
King: We were wrestled to the ground by expectations of what television should be in terms of numbers, and the way it looked and how it’s supposed to make you feel. It was almost not possible.
Kudrow: Because it was, at the time — and maybe still now, I can’t tell — so “cringe” for people.
King: Except “cringe television” didn’t exist. So the reaction to “The Comeback” was “click off television.” People literally don’t want to see that.
Courtesy of HBO
“The Comeback” debuted the same year as the American version of “The Office,” with Steve Carell. That didn’t push as hard, but had elements of cringe comedy. Was the reaction somewhat gendered — people not wanting to see a woman in these situations?
Kudrow: While we were shooting that first season, Michael said, “The only thing is, we don’t have a point of reference for this character as a woman.” We do for men, but not as a woman. I don’t know what difference it makes — I’m so gender-blind. Women are just as desperate as men, they’re just as ambitious and single-minded as men. But years later, I went — women are still victims.
King: Women are allowed to be desperate on television in things that aren’t supposed to be funny. You can be Alexis Carrington on “Dynasty” and be desperate and driven, but that’s a drama or a soap. The complicated thing, and the reason that we’re still talking about it, is the complicated, multilayered performance that Lisa gave that made the character so unpeggable. It wasn’t a complete comic character. It was a dramatic character.
And it preceded “The Real Housewives” — no one had seen any Real Housewife sacrifice her dignity for branding. We thought it was hilarious. Other people were quite puzzled.
This show came the year after “Sex and the City” and “Friends” ended. Did you both feel as though you needed a hard reboot after ending those long-running projects?
King: Not to us, because we were basically chasing this organic laugh we both had for Valerie. The world, or maybe the studio, was expecting Phoebe on “Sex and the City”; even on the poster, it said “From the executive producer of ‘Sex and the City.’” So they were like, “Remember that? Here it isn’t.”
People had never seen a stripped, completely vulnerable performance like Lisa did. It was a soul they saw, and it was upsetting to them — and we thought it was hilarious. We would die laughing at Val, and when it came out, people were like, “This is too hard. I can’t watch it.” We were like, What?
Kudrow: But for the people who got it, they got it.
King: [in Valerie Cherish voice] Well, they got it!
Kudrow: [also in Valerie Cherish voice] Well, they got it! Just to be marginalized, and not giving up — you keep going, and you can’t afford dignity.
King: It was like the early Christians — a small but developed group that understood there was something new. And New York got it. More than L.A. — New York ate it up.
Going into the series launch, did you expect people to embrace it?
King: We thought it was a special character, and that people would think it was so funny. The first moment that my breath caught was when we went on “Fresh Air” with Terry Gross. She started the interview by going, “Well, this is quite a departure.” I was like, What? I was totally taken aback that her first reaction to the show was that it was going to be a thing of some kind. And I do remember specifically what the New York Times said. It was about “Entourage” versus us, because their second season premiere and our first episode were the same night. “It’s more entertaining to watch four young men on the way up than a woman in a freefall on the way down.” That was what the critics said.
Kudrow: And then they came around.
King: When do we get to talk about “then they came around”? Because that’s the miracle — that then they came around!
When did they come around?
Kudrow: By the end of the season!
King: As it was being reacted to weirdly, David Bowie called and asked for the episodes, because he had to go on the road and he didn’t want to miss the rest of Valerie. Could he have the advance copies of the episodes that hadn’t aired? We went around saying, Well, David Bowie likes it.
Kudrow: We’ve got to be picked up! I wasn’t phased by Terry Gross — I don’t even remember whatever she said — because I didn’t expect anyone to understand it immediately. It was raw footage from a reality show, you know? You hadn’t seen that before. And the context was huge for a panicked industry.
King: But in hindsight, there was a moment where we were like, Oh, yeah… There was “Entourage”; George Clooney had that show about actors [HBO’s “Unscripted,” which premiered in January 2005] that came on right before us; we were the third. Oh, yeah, the third one gets beat up. That’s all the crying stuff that I had to put myself through. Lisa was just like Teflon.
Kudrow: We were thrilled with how it did — not just the first episode, but then the second episode and the third. It was at least the numbers that “Entourage” got in its first season. The experience of HBO in 2004, 2005, was, “You’re going to see something that you’ve never seen before on HBO.” They will leave [a new series] on, so that the audience will come to understand that this is a new language. And then HBO stopped being HBO at that moment.
What do you mean by that?
Kudrow: Well, they kept telling us that. It’s not the same. Meaning, “We can’t do things the way we have always done them.” People have to get it immediately, and they have to love it immediately.
King: We went in there and said, “We understand that ‘The Sopranos’ and the ‘Sex and the City’ finale had huge numbers. We understand that you’re probably expecting us to have huge numbers. We understand that that’s the business on Sunday night at nine o’clock. So move us to Monday. Create a smaller expectation.” We even pitched an ad campaign with “Monday, Monday,” that boring Mamas and the Papas song — “If you think you hate your job, wait until you see Valerie!” We kept saying, “Take us from the main stage to off-off-Broadway, and let us do our thing.” They were like, We don’t do that. It has to be this number.
It was a surprise, especially since the big numbers were something that I had helped participate in, that we were one of the rarest of the rare things, a show on HBO that didn’t get a second season, when you had “Arliss” on for like nine seasons.
Courtesy of HBO
Was it a disappointment that the show didn’t get renewed for a second season back in 2005? Obviously, it would eventually get one, but not for a while.
King: It didn’t not get renewed in the moment the first season existed. Lisa and I both got nominated for Emmys for it. It was just in limbo. Despite all the begging I did, the morning after the Emmys, when we both did not win, they call us and say, “We can’t do any more of this, right?” Then it went away for a very long time, and then, all of a sudden, HBO calls us — Mike Lombardo and Casey [Bloys] and said “We made a mistake. Would you do another season?” Ten years later.
Were you thinking, in that intervening time, about what Valerie would have been up to? Do you think about that still?
King: There’s always a meeting, every now and then, where we put ideas on the table. It has to be a really intricate combination of things to get us both to the place where we think, Oh, God. We laugh at anything; Valerie could be funny anywhere. But the thing we’re always looking for is, what would make an event worthy of Valerie coming back? So we’re constantly meeting — hey, what about this?
We had a whole second season planned, when the first season was canceled. And when we actually did the second season, it was nothing like that, because the television landscape had moved along. So we decided to reflect Valerie going to HBO, on a dark cable series.
It was that moment of “Breaking Bad” and shows like it, and she didn’t fit in. What would have been your plan for a 2006 Season 2?
King: We left the first season with Valerie in success. So much of the first season was Valerie desperate for success, desperate to be seen. What if she was seen? We talked about how that dynamic would change.
Kudrow: She’s back on “The Comeback” [the reality show within the show] and another season of “Room and Bored.” Paulie G and Tom Peterman are fired, and it’s Gigi running the show.
King: She picked the girl writer, but does absolute power always corrupt? If you’re in charge, do you always become Paulie G? Is there a Paulie G in every writer, and what does Valerie do if she basically picked her next torturer?
I have always found the ending of Season 1 — in which Valerie is finally surrounded by adoring fans, after basically having torched her dignity on the reality show — fairly thrilling in its darkness.
King: There’s a moment in there that would intimate where we were going with the second season; the camera leaves Valerie and goes up on Mark, and he looks completely confused as to why this woman just did a complete reverse.
Kudrow: Valerie is too single-minded — the things that don’t serve her don’t exist.
Do you think some of the reasons the show struggled in 2005 make it far more legible in 2025? In a world of front-facing phone cameras, a media-hound reality-show protagonist seems far less foreign.
Kudrow: It’s much more identifiable. We’ve seen “Housewives”; we have another point of reference for a woman and what she’s willing to do. Every one of those Housewives, they know what they’re doing; they’re playing a role in order to get their brand out there, and it’s a means to an end.
King: It would be easier, but it would be much less impactful. I doubt we would be still talking about the show 20 years later. The thing that impacted us, and maybe cut into the ratings, was that we were so ahead of it. Valerie could show up right now, but people would probably go, “Oh, she’s like a Real Housewife, right?” But when Valerie was the first, people thought it was a horror movie. They didn’t know if it was a comedy, if it was a snuff film. No one even knew what they were watching, and it was riveting. The mistake of television is if you’re doing something that’s already been done.
Courtesy of HBO
It must be gratifying to have been so ahead of the curve.
Kudrow: I mean, yeah, sort of.
King: That’s so Lisa. Sort of.
Kudrow: I mean, not gratifying that everyone started living their life on camera. But we saw it coming. In the moment, it didn’t feel like we were way ahead of the curve. This whole business was in a panic over the end of scripted television. We were just feeling the panic of what was going on.
King: I remember [former HBO boss] Carolyn Strauss reading it and going, “Is it going to be funny?” Carolyn’s a brilliant interpreter of scripts. And when they heard Lisa do Valerie for the first line, they all relaxed. They picked us up for those first 12 before they even knew what it was. They trusted some weird vibe Lisa and I were selling them, because we were really connected with the thing. They never made us prove anything during the process.
When we were filming the Palm Springs episode, which is the turning point, I had just seen the cut of the third episode, where Valerie’s waiting for the valet that never comes. I was ashen. We were at the Parker in Palm Springs, and Lisa had her hair up in a towel, going to the set. I came out and said “What are we doing? I just watched the third episode, and she’s just standing there, waiting for a car? What are we doing?” Lisa looked at me with the towel in her hair and said, “It’s exactly what we wanted it to be. Uncomfortable.”
Kudrow: And then HBO wrote back: “This is our favorite episode so far!”
Can we talk about how you two developed Valerie? I know she emerged from a character Lisa had done with the Groundlings.
Kudrow: I hadn’t developed her. I just did what I thought was a funny character, an actress on a TV show who has this affectation in the way that she speaks. She’s probably from Van Nuys. There was just the phoniness of, “Let’s all try to save the planet — please, as a favor to me. I’ll love you for it, I really will!”
King: We met, and we had just finished our shows. We like each other, and our agency wanted to see if we wanted to work together. Lisa said, “If I was going to do a show, I like this character.” She said, “I’ll love you for it” and I just started laughing. The voice is born in Lisa, and the one thing we knew is that Valerie is going to be a redhead, I guess because Lucy’s a redhead.
Kudrow: We do know why! Because a blonde is ditzy, and brunette is too serious. But a redhead is sexy and smart!
Courtesy of HBO
Speaking of the hair, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Robert Michael Morris, who played Mickey, Valerie’s beloved hairdresser. I wanted to give you both the opportunity to talk about him, because he was such a big part of the show before his death in 2017. Michael, I know he’d been your theater teacher.
King: Mickey had to be authentic. He had to look like a person that wandered in on a reality show. That can’t be an actor. I had a guy, and Lisa was like, “I trust you.” When we were doing the second season, we knew that he was sick, and after the first day, which was shaky, it was like playing Mickey made him more and more himself, and stronger. The way to end this and make it not sad is that when he died, I saw an article that said “Robert Michael Morris, television star, dead.” There’s nothing Mike would have liked more than seeing “television star” in his obit.
Kudrow: He would give me jewelry that he would get on QVC. I wore it to the [Actors on Actors] shoot with Parker [Posey] — an interlocked silver thing, with, you know, “diamonds.”
King: He handed it to Lisa at his audition. She put it on, and she didn’t take it off until after we were shooting.
We’ve circled around the idea, so I’ll ask it plainly: Would “The Comeback” ever return for a Season 3?
King: It’s really about whether we can find an idea worth going beyond one joke.
Kudrow: We’re always talking about it and looking for it.
King: She’ll show up at one of those lunches, and I’m laughing as hard as I did 20 years ago. It’s the same vibration. The thing about Valerie — the reason why, if we find an arena, it’s going to be great — is that Valerie will never get everything she wants. It’s thrilling when you have somebody who’s practically a Greek character, going through the underworld to get the golden apple and coming back up like, “Well, I got it!”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
