The Comeback: Season 1 (2005)

Some time around the mid-00s, reality television started to overtake sitcoms and soap operas as the vanguard of virtual, vicarious domesticity. Insofar as sitcoms and soaps were reality television in filigree, they were at least as interested in documenting actors whose lives subsisted on the same sets and scenarios year after year as in the fictional worlds those sets and scenarios supported. As a result, reality programs were – and continue to be – fascinated with characters who are forced or coerced into treating their own life as a soap or sitcom, forced to face the fact that they’re living in one giant set, that their domestic life has become virtual and vicarious even to them. No television series captured this juncture as beautifully and effortlessly as The Comeback, a collaboration between Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow that sees Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, a fading sitcom star from the early 90s desperate to kickstart her career in the mid-00s. Luck comes her way when she’s offered a role on an up-and-coming sitcom, Room and Bored, but there’s a catch – she can only get the role if she agrees to have her entire life filmed for a reality program called The Comeback that follows her efforts to get back into the industry. What we’re presented with is the raw footage for The Comeback, which effectively plays as a fictional reality program about making a fictional sitcom, with all the tensions and contradictions that entails. If it were any less pitch perfect it mightn’t work, but Kudrow and King’s vertiginous oscillations between tragedy and comedy, reality and sitcom, are so poised that the series somehow manages to convulse for thirteen whole episodes without ever quite losing control, or precipitating Cherish into the breakdown that always seems to be one episode away. In part, that’s down to Kudrow’s extraordinary face, which has never been as plastically visceral as it is here – squirming between sitcom and soap spotlights, it’s less a face per se than a kind of thought-experiment about what happens to the face when bombarded with everything reality television has to offer. At the same time, King’s sense of camp has never been so exquisite, so refined – it makes Sex and the City feel like a rough draft – nor so universal in its sweep and scope, its attention to the heightened camp of everyday life in a reality media economy. Elegantly, almost invisibly merciless in its satire of the television industry, it’s perhaps not hard to see why it received such lukewarm reviews, nor why its stature has grown so much over time, since it’s ahead of its time in the strangest, uncanniest way - the kind of series that would have to wait a full decade for a second season, an entire lifetime in soap, sitcom and reality terms.