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Coming off a long-running sitcom is kind of like having a baby. The actors -- and series creators and writers, for that matter -- are tired. They've put a lot of time and effort and sacrifice into the baby that is their sitcom, and once they've successfully delivered a highly rated finale and tied off the umbilical cord of the series, they just want to nap, maybe read some books, do some yoga, and take a break from the miracle of creation. But, as anyone knows who's had one, the baby will be about four days old before everyone who meets it starts asking its parents when they're going to supply it with a little brother or sister, and so it is with sitcoms: the rare feat of coming up with one that even lasts past its first birthday, never mind its ninth or tenth, just means that expectations are all the higher for your next creative offspring. And if you don't even try to produce one, everyone's just going to assume not that you're choosing not to, but that you are sterile. (Creatively.)
For the cast of Friends -- which ended its ten-season run last May -- the example of the cast of Seinfeld must have been very instructive. Seinfeld ran nine years, wrapping up in May of 1998. Its titular star, Jerry Seinfeld, had co-created the show and therefore could, potentially, never work again, and just live on the millions generated by the series's syndication. But the rest of those mooks who supported him now needed to support themselves, and so moved on to The Michael Richards Show, Bob Patterson, Watching Ellie, and Listen Up, none of which lasted longer than twenty-two episodes. Lesson learned: getting back in front of viewers is important, but not if your sitcom vehicle is a lemon.
Other than Matt LeBlanc -- who (due, probably, to a marked dearth of any other offers) ended up at the centre of a Friends spin-off that's performed far below all expectations for it -- none of the Friends had attempted to return to sitcoms. Jennifer Aniston has seven movies coming out between now and 2007; David Schwimmer did a voice in Madagascar and directed some Joeys; Matthew Perry's been playing poker; and Courteney Cox (Arquette) dodged the whole issue of when she'd give Friends a little brother or sister by having an actual baby. Well played, Cox. Well played.
Last month, the sixth Friend decided that it had been a decent interval, and presented to the world a bouncing baby sitcom called The Comeback. It's a winky series that works on several meta-levels: (1) it's a mock-reality show about (2) former sitcom star Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) trying to recapture her faded glory. Like the other HBO sitcoms Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, (3) it has actual showbiz people playing themselves, only fewer of them --like renowned sitcom director James Burrows, and ex-sitcommers who are supposed to be on Valerie's level like Kim Fields and Marilu Henner.
The joke of every moment of every episode is that Valerie is pathetic. The show she had been on was rather cruelly called I'm It (because she's not It anymore), and lasted ninety-seven episodes (almost but not quite long enough for it to get sold into syndication). It was evidently on in the '80s, judging by the aggressively hot-rolled hairstyle she's apparently been rocking since then. Now she's playing the Mr. Furley-like Aunt Sassy to a bunch of horny, semi-nude twentysomethings on a show called Room and Bored, and her doing a reality show about it called The Comeback is a condition for her having landed the role at all. In the course of the show's first few episodes, Valerie has been humiliated by a valet, the show's head writers, her co-stars, and a puppy, who literally takes a shit on her. Some critics have complained about the show's cynicism, and wondered what it says about Kudrow's experience as a rather successful and multiple-award-winning sitcom star that she has taken the clout she earned with it and used it -- she is also one of The Comeback's producers -- to make the process of making sitcoms look so distasteful. On the surface, The Comeback could look like Kudrow's riff on her own persona and fame; it might be more accurate to say that it's a dis on every Delta Burke or Justine Bateman who couldn't ever replicate the success of her first hit (and especially a dis on Kirstie Alley, also the star of a multi-meta reality sitcom about her own failing comeback), and as such, it's pretty bitchy.
Which is why, we think, Lisa Kudrow is never going to get any more famous than she was during the Friends years -- as a sitcom star, at least: we...don't like her. Not that we don't like her acting, which is fine, or the sitcom character for which she's most well known, who entertained us perfectly well. We don't like her. For no reason we can especially put our finger on, she comes off really prickly and snotty, which qualities are anathema to sitcom stars -- especially female ones. It's an archaic notion that we should feel we get along with people we'll never meet in order to support their endeavours, but hell, if pollsters can ask voters which presidential candidate they'd rather have a beer with -- and use that as an accurate predictor of the election's ultimate winner -- why shouldn't TV viewers have the same attitude toward the stars of the shows they watch? Cox and Kudrow call us up to have lunch and go shoe shopping? Well, Cox is going to go on and on about how she's decorating her latest house in Malibu and Kudrow's going to keep finding ways to remind us of how she has a degree in psychobiology, so we're going to be washing our hair. (Aniston wants us to come hold her hand while she gets a bunion removed? Jen, honey, where and when?)
This month, however, also marks Kudrow's return to the big screen with a movie that -- unlike Analyze This, Hanging Up, Lucky Numbers, Dr. Dolittle 2, Analyze That, and Marci X -- we'd willingly pay to see: Happy Endings, the latest from Don Roos, her director on The Opposite Of Sex. Kudrow isn't carrying the whole enterprise on her own, but is part of a large and diverse ensemble cast, which is usually a good thing for the viewer; more than half and hour of Kudrow's tics, or of one of her "funny" voices, have been known to cause psychotic rage and hysterical deafness.
If Lisa Kudrow returned to playing only interesting character roles, as in Happy Endings, it would be better for her: she'd have less to do, more time to spend with her family, and a higher-quality work product. It would also be better for us -- all of us -- because we wouldn't feel compelled to sit through such effortful efforts as The Comeback. And if we saw her less often, we might forget how disinclined we are, now, to count her among our celebrity friends. So we have to say that for Kudrow to experience a de-fame-ing would make the world a better place for everyone.
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