Every so often, in the decade following The Comeback’s second-season finale in December 2014, co-creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King would huddle to brainstorm ways to resuscitate Valerie Cherish.
They weren’t ready to let a fame-obsessed, red-headed fan favorite flatline to has-been status. HBO executives had left the door open for a third, but the time between them was ticking toward unprecedented. But pop culture had never buried Cherish either. From its 2005 debut, The Comeback overcame low ratings to become a cult hit, beloved for its razor-sharp satire of Hollywood and commentary on the changing nature of celebrity. Audiences grew slowly but surely over the years, pulled in by an attraction to Kudrow’s creation: a washed-up TV actress who swims upstream to reclaim a semblance of her former glory amid a sea of brighter, younger things. A surprise renewal nine years later and a critically acclaimed sophomore season cemented it as a pop culture phenomenon and landed it on multiple “best of the decade” lists. The stamp of approval from gay viewers also helped.
Since then, Cherish has resurfaced countless times as a viral meme thanks to catchphrases Kudrow delivered with chaotic verve, like, “I don’t want to see that!” or, “Well, I got it!” — the latter unhinged exclamation becoming a manic meme blasted across social media during the pandemic to announce a positive COVID test.
Alexander McQueen jacket; La DoubleJ ring.
Photographed by Kayla Rocca
During those brainstorm sessions (mostly just an excuse for good friends to grab lunch), the idea that gained the most traction was dropping Cherish on Broadway to star in Chicago, a backdrop that would have been well suited to The Comeback’s brand of cringe comedy. But King felt the musical alone wouldn’t bring enough razzle-dazzle to sustain a season.
Then came a light-bulb moment. Instead of subjecting the clueless Cherish to the rigors of the theater and the performing arts of yesteryear, what if they threw her headlong into the terrifying future of entertainment, to face the existential threat ripping its way through Hollywood and causing panic over the fate of humanity: What if Valerie Cherish were cast in the first sitcom fully written by artificial intelligence?
Well, they got it!
“We both heard the click instantly, and Lisa just started improvising,” King recalls. “She has a very scientific brain, and for Lisa to really engage, some lock has to be opened.” As fate would have it, King had lunch on the books the following week with HBO chairman and CEO Casey Bloys. “I had no intention of mentioning it until [Bloys] used the word ‘comeback’ in reference to something else,” says King, long a member of the HBO family thanks to Sex and the City and its recent spinoff And Just Like That. “Knock, knock, knock! That was the universe’s way of calling me to open the door. I said, ‘Speaking of a comeback, Lisa and I have an idea. What if Valerie stars in a multicam written by AI?’ He looked at me and laughed, and said, ‘Yes. It’s prescient. Go fast.’ ”
Ralph Lauren jacket, skirt; Sif Jakobs necklace, La DoubleJ ring; Gucci shoes.
Photographed by Kayla Rocca
Kudrow was ready to run. She knows the public will always remember her as Phoebe Buffay from Friends and never skips an opportunity to express gratitude for the show’s global success, but Cherish occupies a special place for her.
“It’s fun to be Valerie,” Kudrow says lovingly. “As many times as people would say to me, ‘It must be so hard to play those situations where everyone is so tough on her. Isn’t that grueling?’ I would just stare back, like, blink, blink, blink. Grueling? Not at all. What’s wrong with me? It wasn’t grueling at all. I didn’t feel bad for one second. Valerie creates her own reality. Yeah, she’s a little delusional, but that’s one of the sources of comedy. It’s so obvious to us that people want her to stop talking or that they don’t want her there, but she can’t help it.”
Her friends certainly don’t want her to stop talking.
“Lisa Kudrow as Valerie is so funny because she is so earnest,” says Courteney Cox. “She plays her with total sincerity, making her someone you can’t help but laugh at/with, root for and also be heartbroken by. Ironically, I think it’s also why Phoebe is still such a relatable and beloved character. It really always comes back to the amazing Lisa Kudrow.”
Jennifer Aniston reaches for a nearly identical phrase to describe the comic pathos of Valerie Cherish: “She breaks my heart. She also makes me laugh. She is relatable, lovable and adored.” Aniston doesn’t regularly hop on the phone with press, but she jumped at the chance to discuss her friend of 30 years less than 24 hours after being asked because she “will literally do anything for Lisa Kudrow for the rest of my life, all of my lifetimes.”
And Kudrow will — and did — do everything for Cherish, starring in, co-writing and executive producing the show, which with each season has managed to telegraph major shifts in the industry. “Without planning it, we’ve been telling these stories about potential extinction events,” says Kudrow, explaining how season one rode the wave of reality TV as it was drowning network schedules, while the second installment documented the rise of streaming and prestige dramas that trimmed writers rooms and drastically reshaped the entertainment ecosystem. “Now, 10 years later, it’s the threat of AI that will, what, be one guy and a machine spinning out drafts? What’s going to be left?”
The Frankie Shop jacket; Reiss pants.
Photographed by Kayla Rocca
***
This part of a profile is where you’d traditionally slot in a brief biography, so if AI is coming for everyone’s job, let’s see how it does with mine. The ChatGPT prompt: “Can you detail Lisa Kudrow’s personal life?”
Lisa Kudrow was born on July 30, 1963, in Los Angeles, California, and grew up in a family with a strong academic background — her father was a physician and headache specialist. She attended Vassar College, graduating with a degree in biology, and initially planned a career in medical research before pursuing comedy and acting. Kudrow married advertising executive Michel Stern in 1995, and they have one son.
“What about her professional success?”
Lisa Kudrow is an Emmy Award-winning actress, writer and producer best known for playing Phoebe Buffay on the hit NBC sitcom Friends (1994-2004). She has since built a career across television and film, starring in projects such as The Comeback, Web Therapy and films including Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, while also working as a creator and producer. Kudrow is widely recognized as one of the defining comedic performers of her generation.
It’s all true, I guess, but not nearly as rich as how it played out. It’s also not as fun as asking Kudrow herself to fill in the details during two hours spent on the terrace at the Beverly Hills Hotel’s Polo Lounge over a spread of coffee, scrambled eggs, extra crispy bacon and a side of cream cheese on a rainy morning in mid-February.
Dressed in a dark sweater and raincoat, she arrives looking almost incognito with hair pulled back and a pair of sunglasses to shield inflamed eyes that caused her to be all of two minutes late. She apologizes anyway, and later blames the irritation on Botox, which she says she got for the first time at 60, two years ago. This latest injection might be her last. “I think it contributed to my eye irritation and this weird pattern on my forehead, so I’m probably done with it now anyway,” says Kudrow, who admits she’s surprised that people still recognize her in public. “I am scared of having to see myself looking like my grandmother one day, but I’m excited to play older roles.”
Kudrow grew up in a Jewish family in Tarzana and graduated from nearby Taft High School in Woodland Hills. She did a few plays in junior high but got serious about science in high school and ended up getting a degree in psychobiology at Vassar. She toyed with the idea of following in the footsteps of her renowned neurologist father, who specialized in headaches, and even contributed research to one of his studies. What derailed her from that track was her brother’s childhood friend, SNL star Jon Lovitz, who recognized a fellow comic talent beneath the lab coat and suggested she study improv at The Groundlings.
Before she got accepted to the main event, Kudrow tested the waters in a class taught by master of the craft Cynthia Szigeti, whom she has credited with honing her skills in a way “no one else could have.” It was in Szigeti’s class that she encountered a young Conan O’Brien. Kudrow was mesmerized by his genius from the jump. They’re still close.
“Few people can tune in to a character like Lisa. She’s this highly calibrated radio that can pick up on a specific beam and stay loyal to that,” says O’Brien. “There can be winds blowing, high rains, static electricity in the air with lightning, and she will keep pulling in that exact channel, even if it’s a thousand miles away. I saw her do that for years in improv at The Groundlings, and I watched her do it in her career before Friends, on Friends and later in movies.”
Friends stars Matt LeBlanc, Kudrow, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry.
Reisig & Taylor/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images
***
AI summaries have an uncanny ability to squeeze out the good bits. Among other glaring omission: Kudrow’s Friends fame catapulted her to the big screen alongside Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal (1999’s Analyze This), Meg Ryan and Diane Keaton (2000’s Hanging Up, directed by Keaton), and John Travolta (2000’s Lucky Numbers). But she truly found her groove in indie movies like Clockwatchers and two films for Don Roos, The Opposite of Sex and Happy Endings. That’s where she thought her post-Friends life would take her. “I wanted to do independent films,” she says, offering a clear-eyed analysis about why some of her films worked, while others did not. “I’m not a romantic comedy actress. I’m not cute or sexy, or the type of character where my only problem is I am too clumsy to have a boyfriend, you know what I mean? I couldn’t wait to just be older and age out of certain things. Isn’t that weird?”
She’d already found her own happily-ever-after in real life with Stern, an advertising executive. “I feel like the luckiest thing that happened to me was that I met and fell in love with the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with before Friends, right before,” she says.
Michel Stern and Lisa Kudrow at the Golden Globe Awards in 2003.
KMazur/WireImage
Friends ended in January 2004, and four months later, Kudrow happened to be on a break from filming Happy Endings when her agents at CAA pitched a lunch meeting at the Polo Lounge with another one of their clients, Michael Patrick King. Kudrow recalls their first meal with clarity.
“Right over there,” she says, pointing to the center of the terrace from our quiet banquette. “I had a couple days off and my agents said, ‘All right, we are done with Friends, and another one of our clients, Michael Patrick King, is done with Sex and the City. We’d like to put you together.’ But I told them that I had already known him a long time.”
She remembers that first encounter with King, too, on the Sony lot in the early ‘90s. A pre-Friends Kudrow found herself in Culver City filming a role on Mad About You as Ursula Buffay (yes, that Ursula, Phoebe Buffay’s twin sister), while King was part of the team on Good Advice starring Shelley Long and Treat Williams. Since they had mutual friends, conversation came easily.
Kudrow took those chill vibes to the Polo Lounge, where she figured, at the least, they’d satisfy their agents by having lunch and a laugh. And they did. She had zero interest in another traditional sitcom — “I’d already done as good as it gets” — but did she have an idea about a phony actress on a late night talk show. She mentioned it to King and, to her surprise, he bit. Four hours later, they had the blueprints for a pilot.
She’d recently become obsessed and horrified in equal measure by reality TV, specifically Survivor and The Amazing Race. The competition shows were certified hits, and the genre as a whole was still in its infancy, with The Osbournes and The Anna Nicole Show. The Real Housewives were not yet a twinkle in Andy Cohen’s eye.
“I saw the very first season of Survivor and loved it. What a phenomenal show, but the guy who won was despicable,” she recalls, referencing inaugural villain Richard Hatch. “How do people say that he played a better game worthy of $1 million? Why aren’t you rewarding the person who played a great game, didn’t stoop to his level and was a shining example of humanity? That person should get $1 million. I remember thinking, ‘This is the end of civilization,’” Kudrow explains. The speed with which the genre permeated network schedules, leading to a pullback of narrative shows, only confirmed her apocalyptic fears.
“Then I watched Amazing Race and saw people vomiting on TV in front of the entire nation, crying while their partners screamed, ‘Keep going!’ It was the most humiliating thing I’d ever seen, and people were signing up for that? How are they going to feel once they realize what they allowed to happen on camera?”
Left: The Frankie Shop jacket; Reiss pants; Gabriel New York ring; Gucci shoes. Right: Dalood coat dress; Reiss pants; JW Pei shoes; La DoubleJ ring.
Photographed by Kayla Rocca
During that lunch, Kudrow and King played a game of Frankenstein by sewing the parts of a desperate sitcom star together. What if a slightly delusional but still charming actress faded toward irrelevance, only to claw her way back by way of a reality TV show? Hilarious. And what if the audience could only see the raw, unproduced footage because it would add to the drama as they watched her try to control what was being captured even when (or especially when) it made her look really bad? Hysterical.
The eldest of the Friends cast, Kudrow was 40 by that point and ready to challenge the perception that female stars should kiss their screen careers goodbye at that age. “It has to be HBO,” Kudrow recalls King saying. “He knew that nobody has seen anything like it before and that’s the only place we’d be able to get away with something like this.”
King was right. HBO debuted The Comeback on June 5, 2005. It starred Kudrow as Cherish, a sitcom actress who broke out with the beloved series I’m It! When the show finished its run, Cherish struggled to find work and after nearly a decade out of the limelight, she jumped at the chance to audition for a new sitcom, Room and Bored, but the series regular role came with a required side hustle: Star in a companion reality TV show that would chronicle her return, humiliations and all. In lieu of tribal councils, detours or roadblocks, à la Survivor and The Amazing Race, they gave Cherish Hollywood-specific hurdles: butting heads with a misogynistic showrunner, begging for an extra take from a curmudgeonly TV director and getting dissed during upfronts.
Because Kudrow was coming off one of the most successful shows ever, she knew people would inevitably try to draw parallels between Cherish’s onscreen pitfalls and Kudrow’s real-life experiences. But the truth is, you’d be hard-pressed to find an interview from the past 30 years that doesn’t feature Kudrow gushing about Friends. “I have to be honest, none of the dysfunction was informed at all by Friends, but I knew that I would never be able to convince anybody of that, so who cares? I can’t do anything about it,” she says matter-of-factly. She also figured there was no point in trying to replicate the show’s blockbuster success. “I haven’t paid attention to ratings at all, only because after Friends, I don’t even know what they mean. Two million people watched? That seems like a good thing.”
It wasn’t enough. Daunted by low ratings and a “meh” response from critics, HBO canceled the series. King was shocked. “We were hit with such a wave of disbelief and confusion because what we had done connected with us in such a strong way, we were so thrown by the fact that it wasn’t connecting with others,” he says. “We didn’t know how that could have happened. We should have been given a second season. I don’t know why it didn’t happen, but it was definitely a disconnect from how we felt about what we had produced, which we thought was hilarious and unique and well made.”
Kudrow had a different response. “When Michael called to tell me, I didn’t feel bad. It wasn’t my mistake. I felt really great about what we had done and knew that we couldn’t have done better. Someone is making a mistake, and I knew it wasn’t ours. I just thought, ‘Well, I’ll do other things and maybe someday they’ll change their mind.’ Ten years later, they did.”
Michael Patrick King and Kudrow at the premiere of The Comeback in 2005.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Kudrow’s scenes as Cherish during the final season sometimes featured as many as eight cameras pointed at her, including real Comeback cameras, doc cameras and social media shots.
Courtesy of HBO Max
***
The new season of The Comeback arrives in 2026, perhaps the most perilous time Hollywood has ever faced as the town anxiously ponders how AI might shape, or decimate, the industry in the coming years. This season, which debuts March 22 on HBO, will see Cherish tackle that question head-on as she stars on the first LLM-scripted sitcom. To prevent spoilers, the co-creators won’t comment on what Cherish’s crystal ball reveals, but Kudrow does offer some certainty about her own future as Cherish: This is it.
“We need to say ‘third and final,’” she says of the latest season. “I don’t know if I’ll want to do it again in 10 years, so let’s be done, that way no one is asking what’s next or whether we will even want to do more. The most respectful thing we can do for the audience and for the character is make it a three-part story. It’s a trilogy, and this is the end.”
As it happens, Cherish’s AI-written show-within-a-show, How’s That?!, was filmed at Kudrow’s old stomping grounds, Stage 24 of the Warner Bros. lot, where Friends was shot. James L. Burrows, who directed many Friends episodes, has featured prominently in The Comeback and returns for the last batch of episodes. Kudrow says that when she saw him on Stage 24 one day, she couldn’t resist “taking a selfie and sending it to the girls,” as in Aniston and Cox. (Aniston says seeing the photo was surreal and made her heart swell. She immediately texted back, “What’s my call time?”)
Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in a scene from How’s That?!, filmed inside Stage 24 at Warner Bros.
Courtesy of HBO Max
“I didn’t want to bother anybody, but I couldn’t help it,” says Kudrow, as she moves on from scrambled eggs to Nicorette, one piece after another. It was her first time returning to that soundstage since the Friends reunion special, which featured all six members of the original cast (their last appearance together as a group before the 2023 death of Matthew Perry). “The dressing rooms are the same configuration, and it’s the same kitchen and hair and makeup rooms.”
The Comeback cast features new, starry additions like Andrew Scott, Jane Fonda, Abbi Jacobson and John Early, in addition to returning regulars Dan Bucatinsky (also an executive producer), Laura Silverman as indefatigable doc producer Jane and Damian Young as Cherish’s beleaguered husband, Mark. Robert Michael Morris, who played her flamboyant, closeted hairstylist Mickey Deane, died in 2017, so Cherish gets a new sidekick in Tony Award-winning theater director Jack O’Brien, who steps in front of a camera for the first time.
Also new to the fray is Julian Stern, Kudrow’s only child with Stern, who makes his acting debut as an AI tech expert. “He’s got talents I don’t have,” Kudrow says of her 27-year-old son, detailing how, at 9, he was doing stop-motion projects and writing “mind-blowing” short stories. He once pulled off a Lego car crash that built up so much tension it left her wide-eyed. She and her husband were equally awed seeing Julian perform in a high school production of The Laramie Project, during which he sat in an orange jumpsuit for most of the play before delivering a monologue. “My husband and I were boo-hoo-hooing, and I went, ‘OK, he’s got something.’”
Kudrow with her son, Julian Stern, at a 2019 Booksmart premiere in Los Angeles.
Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images
Julian Stern (left) with Mike Mitchell and Tony Macht in a scene from The Comeback.
Courtesy of HBO Max
HBO’s head of comedy, Amy Gravitt, says Cherish is “truly one of a small handful” of TV characters who have the stature to return after a decade away and have their audience waiting with open arms, while attracting talent like Scott. She also credits Kudrow for paving the way for similar creator-performer creations that came after her, like Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Selina Meyer (Veep), Issa Rae’s Issa Dee (Insecure) and Danny McBride’s Kenny Powers (Eastbound & Down).
“What makes her fun to watch is how she presents as out of touch, but she actually is the canary in the coal mine for what’s to come in the industry,” Gravitt says. “All of her malapropisms are what make the warning at the heart of the show go down easier.”
I wondered how Gravitt would answer the critical real-life question at the heart of The Comeback’s new season: Are studios and networks inching their way toward shows written entirely by AI? “I don’t even want to speculate about that,” Gravitt says. “I’ve never used AI in my life, so I’m not the one to ask.”
Kudrow is more willing to engage. “I have a lot of mixed feelings,” she offers. “We talked to people who are working in [AI], and I have nephews in that world, and they say that for the broader public use, it is going to be a really great assistant. But I worry about how many jobs it will take, then what will people do? I don’t know whether I should say this out loud or not, but you can’t get to social unrest faster than hungry people who don’t get to work or take care of their families. That’s a scary thing.”
***
“In the history of television, an actress has never not left a frame of the show,” claims King. “Valerie Cherish is in every frame of every episode. Aside from playing this part across 21 years, we’ve never built a scene where she exits and two other characters look at each other and go, ‘What’s her problem?’ Everything you see, Lisa has to channel it all. It’s unique in terms of a performance because it’s never been done.”
(It’s a bold statement worth fact-checking, so time to take to ChatGPT with another prompt: “Has there ever been an actor who has appeared in every frame of a television show?” The LLM responded with a few questionable examples — Bob Odenkirk in Better Call Saul, Kiefer Sutherland in 24, Jason Segel in Dispatches From Elsewhere, Donald Glover in Atlanta — and one plausible one, Phoebe Waller-Bridge in Fleabag. It missed the one I already knew off the top of my head: Rowan Atkinson in Mr. Bean. In all the above cases as well as in The Comeback, it’s more accurate to see that the protagonists appear in every scene, if not in every frame.)
Kudrow says she ordinarily stays up until around 1 a.m. She had to maintain a stricter schedule to keep up with the demands of the new season, going to bed every night at 8:30 p.m. and waking early to learn all of her lines. The show shot in Los Angeles, a blessing for local production. To Kudrow’s delight, the set included cast holding rooms (communal spaces where talent can hang while remaining camera-ready for long shooting days), which were not in common use a decade ago — and certainly not in the Friends era. “I want to chat and I love connecting with other actors, I really do, but I couldn’t spend a lot of time in there, otherwise I wouldn’t have learned my lines.”
For O’Brien, it’s not difficult to tell the actor and the character apart: “Lisa is someone with a lot of dignity and a lot of poise, and if she were down to her last dime, she wouldn’t do anything hacky. Valerie Cherish feels sometimes like the polar opposite because she just wants to be part of the conversation. She will just keep going even if she’s humiliated. Nothing’s going her way. Everything’s a disaster, and she will walk through fire to get where she thinks she needs to go.”
Kudrow, Dan Bucatinsky and Andrew Scott in an episode of the third season of The Comeback. Scott plays Brandon Wollack, the head of the new streaming service NuNet, which greenlights How’s That?!
Courtesy of HBO Max
It might not have been enough to sustain a season, but King and Kudrow found a way to work Chicago into the final season of The Comeback.
Courtesy of HBO Max
***
On the Warners lot in Burbank on a mid-November night, not far from the iconic Stage 24, it all came down to one last shot — the final scene of the series. Before King could call action, Kudrow knew she was in trouble. “I couldn’t get through rehearsal without getting really choked up,” she explains. “I had to go outside and remind myself, ‘Just be Valerie. Play what’s happening. Play what’s happening.’ But every time I got to a certain point in the scene [tears]. I kept thinking, ‘What are we going to do? Valerie can’t be crying now.’ I told myself, ‘Get out of here, get out of here, be Valerie.’”
Maybe it was the weight of moment, or her love of the character, or both, but Kudrow didn’t know what to do. “Michael had to come in and say, ‘You know what, this is what it is. This is what’s coming out of you and it has to be valid.’ So our DP came up with this phenomenally fascinating shot to capture the last shot. We’ll see if it works. I don’t want to talk too much more about it,” she says. But she will say this: “I bawled. I got so emotional. I’m really proud of it because I co-created it and co-wrote it. And Friends is just a huge part of my life, so the fact that both things had their ending there feels momentous and touching.”
The fact that Valerie Cherish’s final scene went down just yards from where Kudrow also said goodbye to Phoebe Buffay? Maybe that was the universe. She mentions a book that Aniston gave her during their Friends days, Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians, that first unlocked a more spiritual side of her science-minded brain. The book, by Barbara Marciniak, preaches that a conscious awakening can lead to “a new reality, a new Earth,” one free of fear that eliminates words like “should” and “try.” Accept what is.
“I was a biology major, so at first, I went, like, ‘What is this?’ But then I just cracked it open, and kept exploring it and considering it. Why not? What I learned is that if you just say yes and don’t resist, even when it’s not pleasant, things can move in an easier way,” she says. “Things happen the way they’re supposed to happen, and if we cope with that, you can carry on.” Or try another prompt.
Alexander McQueen jacket; La DoubleJ ring.
Photographed by Kayla Rocca
