Ask the Flying Monkey: Lisa Kudrow on the Comeback of "The Comeback!"

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Contact me here (and be sure and include your city and state and/or country!

Q: There are plenty of examples in pop culture history of movies or TV shows flopping upon their initial release and then going on to find “cult” followings. But has there ever been a show quite like Lisa Kudrow’s 2005 series The Comeback which has so clearly been ahead of its time? – Kenneth, Toronto, Canada

A: Let’s face it: satire is really, really hard. Culture is constantly shifting, sometimes in great, sudden leaps forward, so if you’re going to satirize something, you can only hope and pray that the thing you’re satirizing will be more or less the same by the time your project is released. At the same time, you have to hope that enough of the audience is ready for the satire – that they’re as fed up with whatever you’re talking about as you are.

Everyone points to the 1976 film Network as an example of the “perfect” satire. It was widely hailed as a terrific parody of what the television news industry was rapidly becoming – and, in fact, it also went on to pretty much predict the rise of Glenn Beck, Nancy Grace, Jim Cramer, and the rest of the current crop of cable “news” blowhard-idiots.

The Comeback was just as brilliant in its merciless send-up of reality TV’s legions of dignity-free, starf**king wannabees – and ended up being just as accurate in its prediction about exactly where the genre of reality TV was heading.

But the audience simply wasn’t ready to hear it yet – they weren’t yet fed up with reality programming. And so, while the show found critical success, it flopped in the ratings.

Still, like Network, it’s had staying power. And now, with reruns currently airing on The Sundance Channel, it’s having its own comeback of sorts.

What does the star and co-creator Lisa Kudrow think of all the sudden, positive attention?

“It’s fantastic!” she told me. “We heard a rumor that Bruce Springsteen discovered it and is a big fan. That was thrilling. I stopped breathing, I was so excited.”

I was curious if they worried at the time that they were too far ahead of the audience.

“I look back and realize that The Amazing Race was only in its second season,” she said. “To me [it seemed like] everybody was up to speed, reality TV was [obviously] here to stay. But at one point, [co-creator] Michael Patrick King whispered, ‘I think we might be a little too far ahead.’ I said, ‘No!” Because I thought HBO would leave it on. They’re the place for a new kind of show – that’s what they do. And I thought, ‘Okay, everyone’s going to get it in the second season.’ And they stopped being HBO for that moment [and canceled the show]! That’s just the way it is. It’s how it goes.”

If you haven’t seen it, The Comeback tells the story of Valerie Cherish, a 90s sitcom has-been who has agreed to appear on a new reality show, The Comeback, which tells the “real” story of the star’s attempt to revive her career on a new sitcom, Room & Bored.

The Comeback (the HBO series) shows us the “raw” behind-the-scenes footage of the filming of that reality show. In other words, it’s the show behind a-show-within-a-show.

I was curious if the show was improvised at all.

“It was 100% written,” Lisa said, which doesn’t surprise me, given how clever and seamless the satire is. She and Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King co-wrote the pilot, and then she helped them map out the season arc.

With her new webseries Web Therapy and juicy supporting roles in great “small” movies like Easy A, I was curious if she was at a point in her career where she felt she could do only exactly what she wanted.

“Yes,” she said. “Thanks to Friends.”

“Friends?” I said, deadpan. “What’s that?”

She laughed, and even though she was probably totally just being polite, the undeniable fact remains: I made Lisa Kudrow laugh.

I was curious if her more recent, “darker” roles like those in The Comeback, Easy A, and even her new web series Web Therapy (soon to get her back on TV, on Showtime) reflected her actual sensibility.

“When I did The Opposite of Sex, [writer-director] Don Roos cast me in a role that was the total opposite of Phoebe [on Friends], and I then I got a lot of independent films that were darker,” she said. “And my sensibility is kind of dark. And Phoebe was kind of dark. Yes, it was a brightly lit and colorful set, and as it went on, Phoebe sort of normalized a bit. But at the start, the audition piece for the pilot was a monologue about how her mother had killed herself and that her stepfather was in jail and she had to live in her car. One of my favorite things to do is lighten up those absurdly dark things.”

Incidentally, remember Rantasmo’s terrific AfterElton.com vlog on “the Bukudroos Synergistic Triangle,” about the magic that happens whenever Lisa Kudrow works with Don Roos and/or his partner Dan Bucatinsky? Well, Dan was with Lisa when I met her, and he told me he and Don had seen the vlog and loved it – and he insisted that Lisa go home and watch it!