Team Experience sharing their personal Emmy dream picks every day at Noon. Here's Manuel on Lisa Kudrow...
For anyone who watched the criminally underseen first season of Lisa Kudrow’s The Comeback, you know how the former Phoebe Buffay created a portrait of an actress so intent on controlling her image and reclaiming her sitcom career that the dark humor and awkwardness of it all was perhaps too much to bear. If the first season was an excruciating exercise in reality TV satire, the second season was an indictment of Hollywood sexism that used the show’s meta structure (Valerie gets cast as the thinly veiled version of herself in an HBO show about the very show she starred in The Comeback’s first season) to force us to yes, laugh at Valerie’s seeming cluelessness but also to examine why and how those laughs are being elicited. There’s humor in Valerie quite literally living out the demented humiliations that a former writer thrusts upon her as part of making his HBO show “edgy” but with every laugh at Valerie (in a trunk full of snakes, standing awkwardly next to two naked women, going down on Seth Rogen) there was a performance that asked you to empathize with this yes, self-deluded character.
The final episode of the season "Valerie Gets What She Really Wants" is centered on the Emmys themselves!
A consummate physical comedienne (exhibit A: the cupcake stunt from season one, exhibit B: the entire Groundlings sequence this season), Kudrow really got a chance to also flex plenty of her dramatic chops, using her malleable face to project the multitude of contradictions in a character that spends most of her time smiling. But behind those smiles (needy and embarrassing, ecstatic yet demure, quivering when all-too real) lies a depth that few performers could bring to Valerie.
The beauty (and skill) of Kudrow’s performance lies in the fact that as Valerie she is constantly playing to various audiences at the same time. Always aware of the camera, Valerie is always performing for an imagined audience and it is in Kudrow’s subtleties (a quick sigh, half an eye-roll, a half-hearted smile) that she tracks the way Valerie is slowly losing track of when she’s performing for the camera and when she’s merely performing for herself. Indeed, the moments when the show’s behind-the-scenes format (an artificial “reality” in itself) and Valerie’s impetus to be real collide are the best of the series.
"First, I'd like to thank the amazing Seth Rogen. You made me better, Seth. Paulie G. for writing me this wonderful part, for being... Everyone at HBO for believing in me, the members of the television academy... This wonderful honor, and my husband, Mark, who's always there for me."
Here’s hoping the Emmys reward Kudrow’s work in front of the camera (she also co-wrote many of this season’s episodes) with a nomination. I can then begin day-dreaming about the possibility of Kudrow winning for an episode in which Valerie herself wins an Emmy, and besting Julia Louis Dreyfuss (who beat Kudrow when she was nominated for this very same performance nine years ago!).