While making an entire season of television about the dangers and futility of using AI to write comedy, Emmy nominees Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King did accidentally use it at one point.
“I think there was one session that we couldn’t be in the same room, and it was a Zoom session,” Kudrow remembers, talking on today’s special bonus edition of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “We accidentally hit the Zoom AI notetaker, and then it was really useless. Because we’re both taking turns being the various characters, and all it knew was that it was coming from Michael’s computer. It didn’t know that we were acting.”
The two co-creators of The Comeback, which returned for a third and final season this year, didn’t need a Zoom notetaker to know that AI had no place in their writing process. Over the course of three seasons on HBO stretched out across nearly two decades — the first season was canceled after 13 episodes in 2005, with the second arriving in 2014 — The Comeback has had Kudrow’s character, a sitcom actress named Valerie Cherish, grapple with a range of would-be Hollywood apocalypses, including the dawn of reality television and influencer culture. Though Kudrow and King had talked for years about bringing Valerie back after ending season two with Valerie’s Emmy win, it was only with the advent of AI that they knew she had a worthy foe.
The challenge, Kudrow, 63, tells me, was “the balance of how much of this is the AI story and how much of this is the Valerie story.” In addition to revisiting Valerie, who is now starring on a multi-cam sitcom that is secretly written by AI, The Comeback offers satisfying new arcs for supporting characters like Damian Young’s Mark, Valerie’s husband, and Laura Silverman’s Jane, Valerie’s producer. “We didn’t have a requirement that everybody get absolutely everything,” she tells me of the writing process, something Kudrow describes with the detail of someone who is very, very familiar with how good TV comedy writing works.
As King told me back in June, part of the goal of the new season of The Comeback was to give Valerie everything she wanted — a starring role on a new TV show and authority among the cast and crew — and still find the cringe comedy inherent to the character. In our podcast conversation, Kudrow — nominated this year for best actress in a comedy as well as a co-writer with King — tells me about how they pulled that off. “She rejects humiliation,” Kudrow says, about Valerie. “She knows that it’s not practical, and she’s ultimately really practical. She is good at adapting. And when you feel like you’re about to hit an extinction event, if you’re good at adapting, you might survive it.”
The Comeback has been one of the least likely long-running comedies of the last 20 years — but Kudrow tells me she feels pretty certain this season is the last, despite the acclaim and Emmy recognition.
“The best validation was we got to do three seasons. That’s a trilogy,” Kudrow says. “That’s a whole story — chapter one, two, three, the end.”
Hear all of that and more from Kudrow in today’s special bonus episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast, which you can also watch on YouTube if you’re not already!
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