The Comeback‘s initial pitch to HBO was floundering until co-creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King acted out the pilot’s most NSFW scene.
“It was always kind of abstract. Nobody knew what Lisa would do,” King, 71, recalled of their pitch to top HBO executive Carolyn Strauss on Obsessed: The Podcast.
King explained that while Kudrow “did a little bit of Valerie’s personal video diary talking emotionally,” he sat on the couch next to her and imitated the sound of the character’s husband defecating off-screen.
“And Carolyn Strauss started laughing so hard,” he said.
In The Comeback, Kudrow, 62, plays Valerie Cherish, a once-notable TV actress making her comeback on the fictional sitcom Room and Bored. While recording an earnest video diary for the sitcom’s accompanying reality TV series, Cherish’s husband interjects by loudly using the bathroom off-camera.
“I think that combination of defecating and pretension was the package that Carolyn understood,” King, who also directed Sex and the City, said. “But literally, I would have to do the s--tting sound to illustrate what it was.”
Dan Bucatinsky, Kudrow’s longtime producing partner who also stars in the show, recalled the tense pitch.
“I remember that pitch so clearly because it was so not clear,” Bucatinsky, 60, said. “You were forging a whole new kind of way of looking at somebody.” He remembered HBO’s Strass telling them, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you have to make it.”
The Comeback‘s first season parodied reality TV, a new phenomenon when the show aired in 2005—just one year after Kudrow’s tenure on Friends ended.
From the outset, viewers, critics, and executives alike didn’t know what to make of the show.
“The Comeback fans in the first season were like the early Christians. They were all gathered in a cave somewhere secretly, and they knew something special was happening, and they believed in it, but you couldn’t go wide with the information," King joked.
“People don’t realize there were no Housewives back then. Reality television was limited to these competition shows,“ Bucatinsky added, noting that people weren’t accustomed to the ”notion of watching a woman be as vulnerable or as naked” as Cherish.
“I think that’s also the great thrill of her performance, that she never indicates that it’s comic or tragic. She leaves it up to you,” King said of Kudrow’s Emmy-nominated performance. “Maybe that’s why people think it’s their show, because they had to make it their own show by figuring out what they felt about it rather than what they were told about it.”
In the show’s third and final season, which will air 21 years after the first, Cherish stars in TV’s first AI-written show. King says it’s Cherish’s vulnerability that makes the contrast so effective.
“Valerie is so human, which is why I think I’m drawn to her. She’s both sincere and false. She’s open and closed. She’s strong and fragile,” King said. “Like everything, the best part of being a human is the contrasts that we have.”
Season 3 of The Comeback premieres on March 22 on HBO Max.
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