Lisa Kudrow Sheds Phoebe's Skin

The Former 'Friends' Actress Is Starring in Her Own 'Comeback.' Not So Dumb, Huh?

LOS ANGELES

Lisa Kudrow is squinting in the sun on the hotel patio. Pleasure to meet you. So tell us everything about Brad and Jen. There is a beat, a professional pause, and then Kudrow gives that little nose crinkle, a trademark tell perfected over a decade of playing the ditz twins Phoebe and Ursula Buffay on "Friends," and snorts, "Yeah, right."

In the iconography of the "Friends" ensemble, Kudrow played the space cadet(s), but she is actually known off-screen as "the smart one." Perhaps because she graduated from Vassar and studied biology? Her area of interest: the evolution of the biochemistry of human emotion. A burden. Or not.

"When I was first playing Ursula and Phoebe, because people would think you're dumb, they end up saying things in front of you that they wouldn't say in front of a guy or somebody who they thought was paying attention or would do something with the information, like it was way over my head," she says. "That could be useful."

Now she is doing something interesting with her career, first in the new HBO show "The Comeback," a dark comedy about a network sitcom and reality TV, which she co-created with Michael Patrick King, of "Sex and the City."

And also in the new movie "Happy Endings," by the writer-director Don Roos ("The Opposite of Sex"), which is an ensemble drama masquerading as a comedy about: family, betrayal, relationships, lies, longing, children, and Javier the Latino masseur and hottie sex worker. The reviewers are mostly liking it. (It opened Friday in Washington and select other cities.)

First, "The Comeback." The Sunday-night series is about the bottomless need and delusional sado-pathology of a C-level television actress, the character Valerie Cherish, as she struggles to return, way past her stamped expiration date, in a "Friends"-like retread about four sexed-up twenty-somethings. Valerie assumes she is going to play one of the swingles, but her role is switched to the batty upstairs landlady, Aunt Sassy, and she is not the mother of jokes but their butt. To make matters worse, Valerie's stab at a comeback is the subject of a reality TV show, which is pitiless.

So, to refresh: "The Comeback" is a TV show about a TV show within a TV show. Valerie is a piñata for the evil show-runners and network suits. Not that Valerie is sympathetic. She would score a zero on the self-awareness scale. She is a damaged being, but still manages to be appalling. And funny. It's a neat trick.

"A dog pile of humiliation," says Kudrow, of her character's travails on the back lots of Burbank. "But she'll take it. Because her goal is over there." She is pointing off toward the Hollywood Hills. "And this is nothing. Nothing. She can take anything. That's how much she wants it. She doesn't need it, financially. Doesn't need to work. But it's not like she's an artist, either. She just wants celebrity and that's it."

But it's strange, Kudrow says, the feedback she is getting about the show. Many viewers, instead of laughing at Valerie, have begun to cheer her on. "They've invested in what she wants and they want her to have it," she says.

Though the show has not attracted huge numbers -- 786,000 viewers last week -- "The Comeback" is the kind of program that its viewers and TV critics feel strongly about. "Teeters on wonderful," wrote Tom Shales of The Washington Post. "The saddest comedy on television," pronounced Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times. On Web sites devoted to audience critiques of TV shows, the viewers seem divided. To say the HBO series is a dark comedy doesn't quite get it right: Some viewers confess they actually wince; others guiltily inhale the anti-Hollywood fumes.

"I love it," says David Crane, the co-creator of "Friends." "Your heart breaks every week, which is weird for a half-hour comedy experience." Crane, of long experience in the world of network TV, says: "It's truthful. They're going after everybody, and they do it really well. You don't watch and think, God, I'm so glad I'm in television."