With “Six Feet Under” airing its series finale two weeks ago, “Entourage” and “The Comeback” wrapping their seasons tonight, and “Slings & Arrows” bringing its first season to a close next week, our Sunday night TV line-up is slowly winding down. I’ve really enjoyed all these well-written, well-acted series, but although it’s not really movie-related, I had to take a moment to write a little about Lisa Kudrow’s reality TV/sitcom hybrid.
Lisa Kudrow plays Valerie Cherish, a former sitcom star who had a smash hit called “I’m It!” over a decade ago. Now Valerie has struggling to make a comeback by appearing as a Mrs. Roper-style supporting cast member on a T&A UPN-style sitcom called “Room and Bored” while also filming a reality TV show about her life called “The Comeback.” The double layers of fiction and “reality” are spun brilliantly showing the way reality TV is filmed and edited while looking at some harsh “realities” of life in Hollywood. It’s easy to view Valerie Cherish as pathetic, with her inability to let go of her moment in the sun as TV’s It Girl and deal with the realities of being a woman of a certain age in the entertainment business. Her desperate need to make the “A-list” again is painfully exposed by the rough footage that is being shot for her reality show. She is humiliated at nearly every turn, and deals with it by tightening her smile or trying to nobly rise above it. I see something strangely heroic in Valerie’s “I’ll do anything to survive” attitude and her attempt at trying to do the right thing while at the same time doing anything she can to get noticed.
Kudrow is particularly adept at balancing on this line between harsh comedy and painful drama. Her two indie film roles (THE OPPOSITE OF SEX; HAPPY ENDINGS) have shown she is a talented actress capable of handling this dichotomy. Her supporting cast has grown strong over the course of the season, led by the hilarious antics of Valerie’s flamboyant yet closeted hairdresser Mickey (played by Robert Michael Morris; her dour, manipulative, yet gradually sympathetic producer Jane (played by Laura Silverman; her jiggly “Room & Bored” co-star, and current It-Girl Juna (played by Malin Akerman); the insulting, coarse “Room & Bored” writer and co-creator Paulie G (played by Lance Barber; and her supportive, yet frustrated husband Marky Mark (played by Hal Hartley alum Damian Young).
The writers of the show have created a terrific, evolving arc throughout the first season. Valerie’s character was more superficial and less “real” in the first several episodes, but as she gradually let her guard down, and as adversity reared its ugly head (usually in the form of Paulie G) in subsequent episodes, glimpses of the real woman and been more frequent. While these glimpses are not always flattering, they are humanizing, and hence Valerie’s heroism emerged. In the penultimate show of the season, Valerie can no longer stomach the verbal abuses flung her way by Paulie G and she slugs him. I can’t imagine anyone who had been watching throughout the season not letting out a cheer. Because of this evolution, and the odd structure of the show, some viewers may have given up after the first two or three episodes. Those that remained were privy to the emerging brilliance of a unique comedy/drama capping the Sunday night line-up on HBO. Here’s one fan who hopes “The Comeback” comes back next season.