Word: sitcom
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Kudrow, 41, only a year out of TV's most popular sitcom, is not exactly a comeback candidate. But, she says, "I have had moments I worked through years ago where I felt I had to be sexier, to lose weight or that I was supposed to get on the cover of such-and-such magazine." As King puts it: "Forty-year-old doctor? Great. Forty-year-old professor? Great. Forty-year-old TV star? Dinosaur." So Valerie's hyper-self-consciousness--she's constantly signaling "time out" to the cameras during uncomfortable moments--is like an animal's defense...
...comebacks, TV has been doling out second and third acts like Halloween candy. Eccentric Charlie's Angel Farrah Fawcett, p.r. queen Lizzie Grubman and gossip-beset Britney Spears have done reality shows. Kirstie Alley responded to being the butt--so to speak--of tabloid fat jokes on Showtime's sitcom Fat Actress. This summer scandal magnets Tommy Lee and Bobby Brown remind us who they are on NBC and Bravo, while next fall Martha Stewart further pays her debt to society on The Apprentice...
Then there's Valerie Cherish, whom you'll recall as the star of the seminal late-'80s, early-'90s sitcom I'm It. O.K., you won't recall her: she's a character, played by ex-Friend Lisa Kudrow, on the HBO sitcom The Comeback (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.). But you've seen her kind a lot lately: a celebrity desperate to get back in the spotlight. She keeps her old TV Guide cover and a portrait of her Leno appearance framed in her house like a shrine to a former, dead self. She gets a chance to land...
...Kudrow invented a similar character years ago, when she was in the Groundlings improv group. After Friends, she called Michael Patrick King, recently executive producer of Sex and the City. They decided to put Valerie in the two worlds most treacherous for a 40-year-old actress: reality and sitcoms. "The sitcom world is male-dominated," says King, "and sometimes the target is women...
...Comeback knows how quickly and badly this story can end. But this HBO sitcom can be self-serving and smug about those awful networks and their barbaric reality shows. When Valerie meets Kim Fields (The Facts of Life) and Marilu Henner (Taxi) playing themselves at an audition, Fields sniffs, "Who is so desperate for a comeback that they actually want cameras to follow them around all day?" Fields, we should note, once did an episode of the E! dating show Star Dates...