Word: kudrow
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Kudrow, 41, only a year out of TV's most popular sitcom, is not exactly a comeback candidate. But, she says, "I have had moments I worked through years ago where I felt I had to be sexier, to lose weight or that I was supposed to get on the cover of such-and-such magazine." As King puts it: "Forty-year-old doctor? Great. Forty-year-old professor? Great. Forty-year-old TV star? Dinosaur." So Valerie's hyper-self-consciousness--she's constantly signaling "time out" to the cameras during uncomfortable moments--is like an animal's defense...
Then there's Valerie Cherish, whom you'll recall as the star of the seminal late-'80s, early-'90s sitcom I'm It. O.K., you won't recall her: she's a character, played by ex-Friend Lisa Kudrow, on the HBO sitcom The Comeback (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.). But you've seen her kind a lot lately: a celebrity desperate to get back in the spotlight. She keeps her old TV Guide cover and a portrait of her Leno appearance framed in her house like a shrine to a former, dead self. She gets a chance to land...
...Kudrow has a different take. "Reality," she says, "is humiliation TV." Humiliation--how much of it a person will take for fame--is the point of The Comeback. Kudrow invented a similar character years ago, when she was in the Groundlings improv group. After Friends, she called Michael Patrick King, recently executive producer of Sex and the City. They decided to put Valerie in the two worlds most treacherous for a 40-year-old actress: reality and sitcoms. "The sitcom world is male-dominated," says King, "and sometimes the target is women...
What gives The Comeback its, well, reality is Kudrow's layered performance; she gives sympathy and poignance to what could have been a one-joke dimwit. Valerie is the Willy Loman of sitcoms, trying to will herself into the second half of her career on a blow-dry and a nervous smile. When it gets past its preaching about reality TV and show biz, The Comeback hits a universal theme: Valerie is being forced, despite her struggle, to recognize the truth about herself. During a spat, she tells her sitcom's producer how much better she was treated...
...Alan Ball (American Beauty). Before it, HBO's Sex and the City, which set the standard for frank talk about women and love, was created by Darren Star and later run by Michael Patrick King, both gay. (Later this year, King debuts The Comeback, an HBO sitcom starring Lisa Kudrow as an actress trying to revive her career...