'Comeback' has layers of dark laughs
HBO's ''The Comeback" is a little TV house of mirrors. You walk into a fake reality show called ''The Comeback" about an aging comic actress named Valerie Cherish who's in a new sitcom called ''Room and Bored," and Valerie is played by the aging comic actress Lisa Kudrow who's in a new sitcom called ''The Comeback," which is a fake reality show.
As Camille Paglia might put it, it's a SITCOM within a META-REALITY-SITCOM within a REALITY within a CULTURE!!! Or something like that.
But all you really need to know about ''The Comeback," which premieres Sunday night at 9:30, is that it's a darkly witty new comedy. As self-conscious as the premise may sound here, it unfolds with the sort of natural black humor of the BBC's ''The Office" and the instinctive cynicism of ''The Larry Sanders Show."
It's funny, but painfully funny, as it skewers the world of banal sitcoms and youth-market mania. It's mean, but touching, too, as Kudrow's Valerie undergoes the humiliations of being a Nixed Big Thing.
And it's a cultural tragedy, but also a hopeful beacon, as it strongly suggests there will be no post-''Friends" creative death for Kudrow. As American TV comedy flails about for ways to surprise us, ''The Comeback" represents a step forward.
''Even if not as brilliant as ''The Office," the show is an uncomfortably intimate ''documentary" portrait of a person who can't see herself as others see her. It's filled with strained silences and odd rhythms as cameras follow Valerie on her return to TV a decade after her first sitcom hit, ''I'm It."
A creature of self-delusion, she's unaware that she has faded from public memory, that she's lucky to have a job. She believes the TV industry and the viewers who once gave her a People's Choice Award loyally await her return. But of course no one cares, and she has been relegated to playing the cranky Aunt Sassy to four vapid beauties on ''Room and Bored." Even her marriage, to businessman Mark (Damian Young), is imbued with disinterest.
With its semi-improvised dialogue, ''The Comeback" invites comparisons with ''Curb Your Enthusiasm," in which we ride the bumper car of Larry David's neuroses, and ''Fat Actress," Kirstie Alley's diet roller coaster. But the show, co-created by Michael Patrick King of ''Sex and the City," has a quieter awkwardness to it, and very little name-dropping. The people in Valerie's life don't fight with her so much as they roll their eyes behind her back and protect her from the truth. In one scene, though, sitcom director James Burrows, playing himself, openly loses his patience with her on the set of ''Room and Bored": ''You know what," he snaps, ''you're not 'It' anymore."
Valerie has none of the sweet ditziness of Phoebe Buffay of ''Friends"; she's pathos with blow-dried hair. She's like a sad Shelley Long clone. It's a testament to Kudrow that she has succeeded in creating a woman so distinct in tone from her trademark character. Valerie is brittle and bottled up, and her struggle to protect her own ego is both off-putting and, at times, heart-breaking. When Valerie does a Phoebe-like bad imitation of Woody Allen, it's not the cute bit she imagines it to be; it's just cringe-worthy.
And not everyone likes to cringe during a sitcom; ''The Comeback" will drive away ''Friends" fans looking for more laugh-track mania. Indeed, the show's sitcom within the sitcom, ''Room and Bored," is a skewering of laugh-track comedies like ''Friends," as four half-clad young roommates make sex jokes. And ''The Comeback" is no gentler in its presentation of reality TV. On the one hand, it exposes the artifice of the genre, as Valerie's reality director asks Valerie to redo ''scenes" and deliver her ''lines" with more feeling. On the other hand, it lets us see the gaps that are edited out of most reality shows, including one painful scatological moment involving Valerie's husband. The show has many sharp points, and they can sting.
