Lisa Kudrow Is Back—Again

A visitor to Stage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, in Burbank, last November could be forgiven for thinking that the television show being filmed there was a sitcom called “How’s That?!” The parking spaces outside were marked with “How’s That?!” signs. Inside, director’s chairs with the “How’s That?!” logo were arranged around video monitors. The set—a New England bed-and-breakfast, with kitschy floral wallpaper—was surrounded by sitcom cameras and buzzing crew members wearing headsets. A studio audience filed into the bleachers, and a warmup comic urged them to “shake those funny bones.” Then, with mounting gusto, he introduced the star of “How’s That?!”: “Here she is . . . the one and only . . . the living legend . . . Valerie Cherish!”

She emerged to applause, in a potter’s smock, wavy red hair under a bandanna, looking like a cross between Lucy Ricardo and Mrs. Garrett from “The Facts of Life.” Although Valerie Cherish has a long TV résumé, she is not, strictly speaking, real. Neither is “How’s That?!” It’s a fictitious show within a show, in the third season of “The Comeback,” the HBO series starring Lisa Kudrow, who plays Valerie, an over-the-hill sitcom actress with a plastered-on smile and a bottomless desperation to please.

“The Comeback,” which Kudrow created with Michael Patrick King, the “Sex and the City” impresario, premièred in 2005. The first season found Valerie attempting to revive her career in a lame new sitcom called “Room and Bored,” while reality-TV cameras captured her every humiliation. What we see is the raw footage from Valerie’s reality show. Kudrow’s portrayal was unflinching, an early version of cringe comedy. The more Valerie clung to her square inch of fame, the more Hollywood heaped indignities upon her. After auditioning to be one of the “sexy singles” on “Room and Bored,” she’s relegated to playing Aunt Sassy, a dowdy sidekick in a tracksuit. The season peaked with Valerie throwing up while wearing a cupcake costume. The series was a hilariously merciless show-biz sendup, often excruciating to watch. It was cancelled after one season.

But then, as sometimes happens with Hollywood flops, “The Comeback” developed a cult following; true believers passed it around on DVD. In 2014, HBO revived it for a belated second season, about Valerie’s next attempt at a comeback, starring in a prestige HBO dramedy, based on the events of Season 1. Now, twelve years later, Valerie is back for a third and (Kudrow insists) final season, which débuts this month, on HBO. Like cicadas, the series pops up every decade or so, each time casting a satirical eye on what Kudrow calls “the television landscape through the lens of an insecure actress.” “How’s That?!” is Valerie’s latest fictional bid for relevance, but it comes with a 2026 twist: it’s meant to be the first sitcom written by artificial intelligence.

“You’re going to see TV magic made before your very eyes!” the warmup guy told the audience (hired extras). In the scene, Valerie, playing the B. and B.’s owner, Beth, has to reshoot a flaccid punch line in the “How’s That?!” pilot, using “alts” cooked up by the A.I. program.

King, who was directing this episode of “The Comeback,” described “How’s That?!” to me as “ ‘Fawlty Towers’ meets ‘Newhart.’ ” He went on, “A.I. put together two sitcoms that people liked and created a new one, and then it looked for a recognizable female star.”

Making the proceedings even more meta, a plaque near the entrance indicated that Stage 24 is “The Friends Stage,” where, for a decade, Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay, the dippy, guitar-strumming massage therapist, on the sitcom that made her a star in the nineties. Unlike her “Friends” colleagues, Kudrow came out of the Groundlings, the Los Angeles comedy group, and she approached playing Phoebe with the arm’s-length specificity of a sketch comedian. In her off-kilter character work, Kudrow is both the scientist looking into the microscope and the wriggling organism on the slide. Of all the “Friends” stars, she’s had the most unorthodox postshow career, creating a menagerie of oddballs, among them the pretentious shrink Fiona Wallice, from her original Showtime series, “Web Therapy.”

“She plays an outsider so well,” Dan Bucatinsky, Kudrow’s longtime producing partner (he also plays Valerie’s inept publicist turned manager in “The Comeback”), said. “Lisa connects, like some kind of silent satellite dish, with the parts of herself that feel misunderstood.”

Valerie Cherish is Kudrow’s finest creation: a poor man’s Shelley Long, oozing queasy contradictions. Valerie regards herself as a loosey-goosey funny girl, but she’s as tightly wound as a Rolex. She’s addicted to the glare of reality TV, yet she buries any authentic emotion behind a schmaltzy, camera-ready front. Her show-biz instincts, like her hair style, are stuck in the nineteen-eighties, and nothing makes her prouder than her one People’s Choice Award (because it’s “from the people”).

At Stage 24, Kudrow as Valerie as Beth stepped onto the B. and B. set and delivered the new A.I.-generated punch line: “Well, I guess those ants were termites!” King cut the next take short to work out a camera problem, and during the delay Kudrow herself briefly surfaced from her nesting doll of personae. “Sorry,” she told the extras in the bleachers. “Well, it’s not my fault. Just as a human, sorry for the inconvenience.”

During a break, I asked her how it felt to shoot a fake sitcom on the “Friends” stage. She thought for a moment and said, “I’m trying to think of a word that’s not ‘mindfucky.’ ” It had been eleven years since she’d last summoned Valerie Cherish. “But she’s the same,” Kudrow reported. “Maybe not as desperate. I feel like every ten years she’s kind of becoming more of an intact grownup.” She smiled and added, “She’s a good person. She wants what she wants.”

Two months later, I met Kudrow in L.A. and hopped into her Tesla. At sixty-two, she exudes a curious combination of discernment and discombobulation. As she maneuvered out of a tricky parking space and nearly crashed into a hedge, she apologized for not thinking straight. Her dog, Emma, had died four days earlier. “She kept me company—I didn’t realize how much,” she said.

To cheer her up, I told her that when “Friends” débuted, in 1994, I was in eighth grade and idolized Phoebe. The first website I ever visited was a fan site called Phoebe’s Songbook, which I read about in Entertainment Weekly and pored over in my school’s computer lab. I even started talking like Phoebe, until my friends called me out on it in the cafeteria.

Kudrow asked why I was so obsessed. I said that it was probably my way of feeling unconventional, even though “Friends” was as mainstream as it got. But it was also her delivery, which had a syncopated rhythm all her own. Kudrow described it to me as a form of “echolocation.”

We drove to Soho House in West Hollywood, where Kudrow pointed to a grand piano and said, “You know what I just found out? That piano was our piano.” (She and her husband had sold it to a dealer.) Mila Kunis was leaving the dining room as we walked in, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson greeted Kudrow with Valerie Cherish’s trademark “Hello, hello, hello!” “Is it Celebrity Day?” she cracked, as if every day at Soho House wasn’t Celebrity Day. We sat at a table where she had recently filmed a scene for “The Comeback,” with a sweeping view of L.A.

“The Comeback” was born in 2004, when Kudrow’s agents set her up on a lunch date with King at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Kudrow was forty and fresh off of “Friends”; King had just finished being the showrunner for “Sex and the City.” Moving on after a hit sitcom can be perilous for an actor; you’re fixed in the public imagination as Monica or Joey or Mork or Opie. Warner Bros. had given Kudrow a vanity production deal, a common ploy to keep stars on the lot, and she’d set up a company, Is or Isn’t Entertainment, with Bucatinsky, whom she had met through his partner, the filmmaker Don Roos. But she wasn’t eager to jump into another series. “I was, like, I’m going to go from independent movie to independent movie. I’m not doing a sitcom,” she recalled.

“Great work designing this angular, uncomfortable furniture today, gentlemen. Shall we celebrate with some secret homosexuality?”

Cartoon by Sara Lautman

Over their lunch, King asked Kudrow if she had any projects in mind. “I do have this one idea,” she told him. Around 1989, she had created a character at the Groundlings called Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show. Kudrow had always cracked up at the way some actors seemed so phony on late-night shows. “They had these Continental accents, and I knew they were, like, from the Valley,” she told me. “And then sometimes just the bullshit of pretending they cared about certain causes.” In the monologue she did at the Groundlings, the character sits in the “Tonight Show” guest chair, talking to an unseen Johnny Carson. “This was my favorite part of it,” Kudrow said, slipping effortlessly into Valerie. “She looks out at the audience and says, ‘The environment’s so important to me. Please, please, let’s save the planet, as a favor to me!’ ”

Kudrow did the bit for King at lunch. “The minute she opened her mouth, it was the timbre and tone and weird sound of Valerie,” King recalled. “She was so self-important and behind the curve.” But he knew that a series would need more “machinery.” Kudrow had been enthralled—and appalled—by the reality-TV boom since the first season of “Survivor,” in 2000, which ended with a victory for the conniving Richard Hatch. “I thought, That’s a bad sign for humanity, that the reward goes to the most devious, untrustworthy one,” she told me. She was similarly disturbed by an episode of “The Amazing Race” in which a man urges on his wife as she force-feeds herself a painfully spicy soup. “Her husband is screaming, ‘Keep going! They’re ahead of us!’ And she’s crying, eating, and vomiting. I went, This is the end of civilization.”

Washed-up C-list celebrities had also started moving into the reality realm, with “The Osbournes” and “The Anna Nicole Show,” in which the addled former Playboy Playmate flounced around her mansion with her toy poodle. Kudrow found it “heartbreaking.” She was a fan of the British version of “The Office,” which adapted the mockumentary format for TV. These trends would lead to “Real Housewives,” the Kardashians, and “Parks and Recreation,” but, in 2004, Kudrow and King realized that they were the perfect frame for Your Favorite Actress, who became Valerie Cherish. Kudrow gave Valerie a slight Southern twang, inspired by George W. Bush’s efforts to be folksy.

They pitched the idea to the HBO executive Carolyn Strauss, who told them, “I’m not sure what this is, but why don’t you just write it?” Kudrow wanted Valerie to be happily married and financially secure so that viewers would know that her lunge toward reality TV was motivated by ego, not family or money problems. Kudrow and King particularly enjoyed concocting the fake sitcoms. Within their fun-house-mirror Hollywood, Valerie’s original claim to fame was “I’m It!,” a workplace comedy that had aired for four seasons in the “Murphy Brown” era. “It was maybe serviceable, but not great,” Kudrow said, explaining the concept. King—who had worked on the nineties sitcoms “Good Advice” and “Cybill”—was inspired by slapsticky shows built around actresses who “all had perms, and they were always getting tangled up in their computer cords,” he said. He based “Room and Bored” on bad Fox sitcoms set at beach houses, with fake ocean backdrops that never moved.

Sitcoms had evolved between “I’m It!” and “Room and Bored,” in part because of “Friends,” which created the template for “sexy” comedies that chased a Gen X cool factor and revolved around romantically enmeshed twentysomethings. But Kudrow wanted to make sure that “The Comeback” didn’t seem like a roman à clef of her own life. In the first installment, Valerie’s nemesis was Paulie G. (Lance Barber), the hipstery co-creator of “Room and Bored,” whose smug nihilism was a foil for her ingratiating perkiness. Although Valerie was the butt of the joke, the show made it clear that she was a victim of Hollywood misogyny and ageism. In one episode, she tries to win over the male writers with a late-night cookie delivery, but, when she looks through a window into the writers’ room, she finds them pantomiming graphic sex with her, roaring with laughter.

In 2002, a former assistant in the “Friends” writers’ room, Amaani Lyle, had filed a complaint after she was fired from the show, claiming that the writers had made her listen to their lewd fantasies about Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox. (A court later dismissed the suit.) “When that happened, I really did feel, like, Yeah, they’re going to say vulgar, mean, terrible things. What do I care, if I don’t have to hear it?” Kudrow told me. “But it actually did make other people who had to be in the room uncomfortable, and that is an issue.” Both Kudrow and King waved away the idea that “The Comeback” drew directly on Lyle’s case, because that sort of jokey, crude behavior was so common in writers’ rooms that everyone on staff had a horror story.

Midway through shooting the first season, King confessed to Kudrow, “Sometimes I wonder if we’re too far ahead of the curve. People don’t have a point of reference for a woman character in this position.” Kudrow shrugged off his concern. “Well, they do now,” she told him. Cable shows were packed with antiheroes—Tony Soprano, Larry David—but it would be years before the comic antiheroines of “Veep” and “Girls” made their entrances. When “The Comeback” aired, in the summer of 2005, there were hopeful signs; David Bowie called HBO to request screeners, because he was travelling and didn’t want to miss any episodes. In 2006, Kudrow and King were each nominated for a Primetime Emmy. After both lost, HBO informed them that it wasn’t renewing the show. “I wasn’t devastated,” Kudrow said. “It didn’t compute, because our ratings were as good as ‘Entourage’ ’s ratings their first season.” King reasoned, “On some level, the studio might have been expecting ‘Friends’-meets-‘Sex and the City’ numbers. I think they wanted Phoebe in Manolos.”

Kudrow moved on to other projects, including “Web Therapy,” her show about an unlicensed shrink who offers three-minute online sessions, which was also produced through Is or Isn’t Entertainment. Meanwhile, fans of “The Comeback” quietly multiplied. (King recalled becoming aware of a “very big swell in New York.”) After nearly a decade, HBO indicated that it was open to a second season. Kudrow and King came up with the idea that Paulie G. was making a single-camera HBO dramedy and Valerie gets cast as a thinly veiled version of herself. The second season riffed on a new slew of television trends, among them toxic cable auteurs (Matthew Weiner, Louis C.K.) and “sexposition,” the tendency on such shows as “Game of Thrones” to dress up plot exposition with gratuitous nudity.

Season 2 came with a tragic hurdle: Robert Michael Morris, the actor who played Valerie’s loyal hair stylist, Mickey, was battling Stage IV melanoma. Kudrow and King wrote his illness into the show, and Morris (who had been King’s college drama teacher) made it through the shoot. When he died, in 2017, Kudrow couldn’t imagine continuing the series, but she and King kept batting around ideas—what if Valerie starred in a Broadway show? Nothing felt big enough. After the 2023 actors’ and writers’ strikes, in which A.I. became a heated point of contention, King had a brainstorm: Valerie gets offered the lead on a sitcom, but it’s written by A.I. Like Valerie, “The Comeback” had become an underdog, barely clinging to the fringes of the HBO lineup. The third season would catch up with Hollywood’s bleak new era of corporate consolidation, second-screen content, and technical upheaval. As King told me, “Now everybody’s as desperate as Valerie was.”

One morning, Kudrow met me at a coffee shop in Tarzana, the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where she grew up. (It’s named for Tarzan; Edgar Rice Burroughs had a ranch there.) She was incognito, in a floppy sun hat and oversized sunglasses. The place had a comfy brown couch in the back, but it was no Central Perk—rather than gossiping with friends over cappuccinos, the patrons were all sitting alone with laptops. We drove to her childhood home, a four-bedroom house on a bright cul-de-sac. The front gate, framed by bougainvillea, had a forbidding “No Admittance” sign, so we stayed in the car. She pointed to a neighbor’s house. “See this long, steep driveway? We would walk our bikes up and then just fly down,” she said, recalling her tomboy years.

Kudrow had an early knack for mimicry, according to her brother David, a neurologist. “There was a Barbra Streisand album called ‘My Name Is Barbra,’ and she would listen to it over and over again, start to finish, and then she would start singing the songs,” he told me. “She had this incredible gift for capturing the most subtle characteristics of somebody.” She loved Bob Newhart and Lucille Ball, and in elementary school she would imitate Lily Tomlin’s pipsqueak character Edith Ann. “I was always offering, ‘I could perform this for the other classes. Might be a treat,’ ” she said. “That’s where Valerie Cherish comes from: ‘I’m a delight! ’”

The Kudrows were secular Jews. Once, when her grandmother was babysitting, Kudrow asked her, “Don’t you miss your parents?” “She started crying, and she said”—Kudrow put on a thick Russian accent—“ ‘They’re dead. They’re all dead. Hitler killed them!’ I said, ‘Who’s Hitler?’ I thought, Was he a serial killer?” Decades later, she executive-produced the genealogy docuseries “Who Do You Think You Are?,” in which celebrities uncover their roots. For her own episode, she travelled to the Belarusian village where her grandmother’s family had been killed by Nazis.

Her father, Lee, who is now ninety-two, grew up poor in Brooklyn, and came to California when he was seventeen. Lee suffered from debilitating cluster headaches. “He told me that, in medical school one time, he banged his head against the pavement to try to knock himself out, because it hurt so much,” Kudrow recalled. He became a prominent cluster-headache specialist. When Lisa was born, in 1963, the family was living in Canoga Park; they moved to Tarzana when she was two. Her mother, Nedra, who died in 2020, worked as a travel agent after Lisa’s two older siblings, David and Helene, were grown. (Lisa also has a half brother, with whom she didn’t grow up.)

Kudrow described her childhood as a happy, upper-middle-class haven—until she hit adolescence. We drove past Portola Junior High, which she attended in the seventies, during the rise of the Valley Girl. One of her classmates was Pamela Skaist, the future co-founder of Juicy Couture. “It felt like Opposite Day every day,” Kudrow recalled. “Popular was not nice people. I didn’t understand that. It wasn’t the smartest. I didn’t understand that. It wasn’t even the prettiest, always. I didn’t understand that. They were mean. Some of them were terrible people. Not Pam Skaist—she was actually nice. But nothing made sense.”

Kudrow pulled out an old photo of herself: stringy brown hair, beaky nose. “Believe me, boys would say, ‘Why are you so ugly?’ ” she recalled. A summer foray into theatre, for which she wrote her own comic sketches, was “the only thing that saved me.” She looked up to her brother David’s best friend, Jon Lovitz, a fixture at the Kudrow home. “I was at their house more than my own,” Lovitz told me. “Mrs. Kudrow, she was such a wonderful woman. I like cookies, so she goes, ‘Jon, I have a drawer for you in the kitchen,’ and she filled it with cookies.” He gave Lisa a book about acting, which he signed, “To my fellow thespian.”

Before high school, Kudrow got a nose job, which gave her face the sleekness of a Brancusi bird. “But I still couldn’t find a boyfriend,” she said. “My father would tell me, ‘You gotta be light and flirty like your sister is.’ I just went, Oh, then it’s not going to happen.” She gave up theatre for biology, thinking she’d become a doctor like her father and her brother, who was in medical school. When she arrived at Vassar College, in upstate New York, she was elated to be among East Coast intellectuals. “Everyone thought I was an idiot, because I was smiling all the time like a California ditz,” she said. She spent her days hunched over lab equipment, and her comedic instincts went dormant. A tough organic-chemistry class knocked her off the premed track, but she took an interest in evolutionary biology, a subject that still fascinates her. As we drove around Tarzana, she lit up talking about CRISPR technology and gene mutations and a study she once read on fossilized birds in Georgia.

But something else was nagging at her. On trips home from Vassar, she’d see actors on the “Late Show with David Letterman” and note how dumb and phony they sounded—the same observation that would later give rise to Valerie Cherish. “All of a sudden, the thought was, O.K., Lisa, when you’re on ‘Letterman,’ just be yourself,” she recalled. “That would blurt into my head, and then I’d think, Wait, why would I be on ‘Letterman’? For an evolutionary-theory idea?” She’d hear ads for sitcoms on the car radio and recoil at the actors’ cornball delivery, imagining herself underplaying the jokes instead. “Lisa, remember to throw it away more,” she recalled thinking. “Wait, why would I need to throw it away? I’m going to pursue evolutionary biology!”

After graduating from Vassar, in 1985, she moved back home, planning to apply to grad school, and started working in her father’s clinic. She held down a job there for eight years, during which she assisted on a study of whether certain headache types correspond to hemispheric dominance in the brain. Earlier research had suggested that sufferers of cluster headaches were more likely to be left-handed; Kudrow’s data disproved this. The results were published in the headache journal Cephalalgia in February, 1994—seven months before “Friends” premièred—under four bylines, including L. V. Kudrow. (Yes, her middle name is Valerie.)

In the meantime, the voice in her head was urging her toward comedy. In 1985, Lovitz was cast on “Saturday Night Live,” and Kudrow’s new proximity to show business intrigued her. She was twenty-two. “I just thought, I don’t want to have any regrets later,” she said. She called Lovitz for advice. He told her, “Go to the Groundlings,” where he had been a member.

When Kudrow informed her parents that she wanted to try acting, she recalled, “they went, ‘Thank God! Maybe this’ll lighten you up, and then you can meet someone.’ ” But when she telephoned the Groundlings, which has a theatre and a comedy school on Melrose Avenue, she was asked when she had last performed and answered, “Junior high.” They sent her to an improv class taught by a woman named Cynthia Szigeti. The first day, Szigeti told everyone to mime lifting a heavy disk and getting angry. “I saw some of these people just indicating anger, like, Grrr,” Kudrow said. “I went, Nuh-uh, that’s horrible. And Cynthia was, like, ‘Great!’ ” Kudrow forced herself to return for the second class, where she spotted a tall red-haired guy doing the disk exercise. “He’s not making a meal out of it—he’s just doing it,” she recalled. “I go, Oh, that’s what commitment is. He’s being it. He’s not overdoing it. So, when that exercise is over, I make a beeline to this guy.” It was Conan O’Brien.

Kudrow credits O’Brien with unlocking comedy for her—at least the comedy she wanted to do, which was smarter and weirder and rooted in truth. “I wouldn’t have made it if not for him,” she told me. (They briefly dated and have remained close friends. When O’Brien had his unlikely audition to replace Letterman, in 1993, he didn’t own a suit jacket, so Kudrow took him to Fred Segal and helped him buy one.) Eventually, she got into the main troupe, alongside Kathy Griffin and Julia Sweeney. “I was not a crowd-pleaser at the Groundlings, because I didn’t do extremely broad, blackened-tooth characters,” Kudrow said. “But I didn’t care. If they were dumb enough to let me in, I was going to do what I liked doing.” Her characters, besides Your Favorite Actress on a Talk Show, included a biology teacher who cracks nerdy jokes about deoxyribonucleic acid, and an old Jewish lady who complains about getting stuck in traffic during the Rodney King riots. Michael Patrick King remembered seeing Kudrow in a sketch called “Audrey Hepburn on a Fishing Show.” “It was her with two rural fishermen, and the point was that she was nothing like Audrey Hepburn,” he said. “It was this offbeat thing, but she was completely unique in her rhythm.”

Another Groundlings member, Robin Schiff, had written a play called “Ladies’ Room,” about women in a bathroom at a pickup bar. The comic relief was a pair of gal pals dressed in “ultra-trendy slutwear,” inspired by the club girls Schiff would see outside the restaurant Nicky Blair’s, on the Sunset Strip. She asked Kudrow and another Groundling, Christie Mellor, to read the roles—Kudrow remembered them as Airhead No. 1 and Airhead No. 2, but they became Romy and Michele—at a backer’s audition for Aaron Spelling. It was Kudrow’s first audition. In one scene, Romy (Mellor) remarks, “I hate throwing up in public,” and Michele responds, “Me, too.” Kudrow delivered it with a burst of enthusiasm, as if delighted to find evidence that they’re soul mates. “I was, like, That girl’s a genius,” Schiff told me. “She showed me what I’d written. So I went through the whole play and looked at all the ways I could bring back ‘Me, too!’ ‘This underwear is riding up my butt crack.’ ‘Me, too!’ Stuff like that.”

“Ladies’ Room” opened at the Tiffany Theatre, in West Hollywood, in 1988, and ran for eight months. Romy and Michele stole the show, eventually becoming the heroines of the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” starring Kudrow and Mira Sorvino. (A sequel is in the works, with the film’s original actors.) The play brought Kudrow a guest spot on “Cheers,” and Schiff wrote Romy and Michele into a pilot called “Just Temporary,” in which the pair work at a temp agency. Kudrow and Mellor also appeared on “Newhart,” as Long Island variations of Romy and Michele. This was the legendary series finale, in which Newhart’s character wakes up next to Suzanne Pleshette, who played his wife on his previous sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” and realizes that “Newhart” has all been a dream. On set, Newhart introduced himself to Kudrow, and she made a mental note that it was possible to be a huge sitcom star and also be nice.

In 1993, Kudrow booked what seemed like her breakthrough role: Roz, a deadpan radio producer, on “Frasier.” She’d been neck and neck with Peri Gilpin. But something was off. “Before we started, I broke out in hives,” Kudrow recalled. “I kept going, Why is this happening right now? And then, sure enough, it just wasn’t working, from the table read on.” She remembered James Burrows, the “Cheers” veteran who was directing the pilot, telling her that Roz was coming off as too mean to Frasier. Burrows’s recollection is different. “Lisa was playing quirky, which she does brilliantly,” he told me. “And we felt we needed somebody who could go toe-to-toe with Frasier.”

Days before the pilot began filming, Kudrow was replaced with Gilpin. “They were so nice about firing me,” she said. “They sent flowers.” Still, she was upset. She took long walks, and all the time in the sun lightened her hair; she then told her salon to make her a full blonde. An agent had advised her that she needed to be gorgeous to land a sitcom, which she chafed at—wasn’t being funny enough? “I went, O.K., maybe I’m not one of those people who gets to work in this business,” she said.

Soon after the “Frasier” debacle, Kudrow got a last-minute offer to play a waitress on an episode of another NBC sitcom, “Mad About You.” Her agent considered it a step down, but she couldn’t afford to pass. “I drove there not knowing what I was going to do,” she said, “and just went, O.K. Listen, respond, and make funny. That’s it. And I did.” The show offered her five more episodes—her rent for the year—and the absent-minded waitress became a recurring character named Ursula.

One of the “Mad About You” producers was dating David Crane, who was casting his own sitcom, tentatively titled “Friends Like Us.” Kudrow had a choice between two pilot auditions, for Crane’s sitcom and for a Fox show, and chose Crane’s because it was on NBC and wouldn’t conflict with “Mad About You.” Her audition monologue was a glimpse into Phoebe’s troubled past:

I remember when I first came to this city. I was fourteen. My mom had just killed herself, and my stepdad was back in prison. And I got here, and I didn’t know anybody. And I ended up living with this albino guy who was, like, cleaning windshields outside Port Authority. And then he killed himself, and then I found aromatherapy!

Instead of investing every misfortune with emotion, she underplayed them: she threw it away, as if describing a series of minor inconveniences. That was Phoebe’s peculiar magic; her world view may have been beamed in from Mars, but it all made perfect sense to her. In preparing for the audition, Kudrow drew partly on a Vassar classmate who’d had to leave school and work at a nursing home. “She’d come visit and tell us stories as if she was having the best time, and she wasn’t faking it,” she recalled.

NBC brought Kudrow in to see Burrows, who was directing the “Friends” pilot. She thought, Oh, no, the guy who fired me from “Frasier.” She performed the speech again, and he said, cryptically, “No notes.” “I left, going, ‘No notes’? Either that’s ‘Yep, she’s hopeless, just like I thought’ or ‘Nothing to change.’ ” It was the latter. “She was right in her wheelhouse,” Burrows told me. “That’s a character she knows somewhere in her past or present.” (Burrows plays himself in “The Comeback,” an industry sage who gives Valerie advice that she’s too self-involved to hear.) When all six leads had been cast, Burrows flew the actors to Las Vegas for some bonding; he handed them gambling money and said, “This is your last shot at anonymity.”

Though “Friends” was about people in their twenties, Kudrow was already thirty-one, the oldest of the cast. Courteney Cox, who had the biggest name (she’d played Michael J. Fox’s girlfriend on “Family Ties”), was struck by her confidence. “My first memory of her was the way she would talk to the producers and be able to articulate what did work and what didn’t work for any particular scene,” Cox told me. “It was fascinating to watch, because she commands respect. She doesn’t come off as defensive. She’s just clear. And then she plays this character who is very airy, yet wise.”

In the pilot, which aired on September 22, 1994, Phoebe attempts to cleanse Ross’s aura; she was something of a New Age cliché, a human version of Fruitopia. But, as the show continued, she became less a ditz than a bohemian freethinker. “On a cosmic level, a certain piece of her is somewhere else and exploring other things,” Kudrow said. By the third season, she was worried that she was getting lazy. “Matt LeBlanc, who’s so fucking smart, went, ‘What’s going on with you?’ I went, ‘I’m not doing the work. I know what it took to justify my lines, and I’m not doing it this year.’ He said, ‘Because you don’t have to. You can relax. She’s in you.’ ”

By then, the six castmates were wildly famous. “The thing that prepared me was that I had been with a really good therapist,” Kudrow told me. “I got pretty centered around boundaries.” But she struggled with body image. “Courteney and Jennifer were smaller and thinner,” she said. “So clothes didn’t fit me the same.” She asked for more flattering costumes, and her self-consciousness got even worse when she had to appear in a bra in “Romy and Michele.” To lose weight, she binged weight-loss teas containing senna, a natural laxative. “That was bad, that stuff,” she said. “I think it messed me up for a while, like, my whole system.”

The “Friends” juggernaut gave the cast an entrée to movies. While Cox did the “Scream” franchise and Aniston became a rom-com queen, Kudrow used her hiatuses between “Friends” seasons to make independent movies, including “Clockwatchers,” with Parker Posey and Toni Collette, and “The Opposite of Sex,” Don Roos’s gay drama in which Kudrow plays a repressed woman mourning her brother’s death from AIDS—a stark contrast to Phoebe. For that film, she won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, beating Judi Dench in “Shakespeare in Love.” “She’s not interested in career-climbing and choosing the next big commercial project,” Roos said. “She just has a very high level of taste.”

As “Friends” got bigger, the cast banded together for a series of well-publicized contract negotiations. They knew that the ensemble’s chemistry was the show’s strength, and that gave them leverage. Their collective bargaining made waves in the industry. Dick Wolf, the “Law & Order” creator, later remarked that the network should have tamed the cast by firing LeBlanc. (“Easy for you to say,” Kudrow said. “The star of your show is a formula.”) In 2000, the press reported a rumor that Kudrow was the cast’s lead negotiator, which she denied. “My team went, ‘We’re going to find out who fucking did this,’ ” she recalled. “I was, like, ‘Why is that a bad thing, that people think I’m smart?’ I didn’t realize: because it makes you a problem.”

At a certain point, it looked as if the standoff might prematurely end the show. “I was driving home one night and thought, O.K., that was it, maybe,” Kudrow recalled. “And I cried my way home. I’m going to miss Phoebe! I like her!” But the gambit worked. By the final season, each “Friends” star was making more than a million dollars per episode, plus a percentage of syndication. “Friends” has never gone out of style—for Gen Z, it represents a pre-smartphone Eden—and the show remains a billion-dollar property. Still, Kudrow told me that reports of the actors regularly making twenty million dollars a year in passive income were overblown. (“Not even close.”)

Only six people in the world have known what it was like to be a Friend. The number is now down to five. Matthew Perry had battled addiction for decades before his death, in 2023, from a ketamine overdose. I asked Kudrow if she’d been worried about him over the years. “How could I not be?” she replied. “Every single time I saw paparazzi, I thought, Is this about Matthew? Are they about to tell me something bad?” After he died, she comforted herself by watching “Friends” reruns; there were entire seasons she’d never seen. She told me that, in the days since her dog had died, she’d been watching the show again. “I guess it’s my grief companion,” she said, with a sad laugh.

On our last day together, I formulated a Unified Theory of Lisa Kudrow: each of her characters has a missing puzzle piece, and their personalities warp around its absence. But each missing piece is different; Phoebe’s floatiness is nothing like Valerie’s self-absorption. “That’s what’s funny to me—like, the smartest person is missing something that’s hilarious, and they don’t realize it,” Kudrow said. “There’s something they can’t sense. It’s how I feel.”

Her own missing puzzle piece, she said, has to do with her “emotional attachment to things.” She didn’t want me to see her home office because it was cluttered with piles of mementos. Kudrow lives in Beverly Hills with her husband, Michel Stern, a retired ad executive from France. She met him in 1987, when he was dating her roommate. “I opened the door and saw him, and I went, I think he’s for me,” she recalled. “Beautiful—which was out of my league. He looked like someone who stepped out of a Merchant Ivory movie.” Six years later, they ran into each other at a party and arranged a tennis date. “We wouldn’t have been ready for each other six years earlier,” Kudrow said.

They married after the first season of “Friends” and had a son, Julian, after Season 4; the pregnancy was written into the show. Kudrow was the first Friend to get married and to have a child. “I had a five-year-old by the time we finished. That was a big battle for me,” she said. Julian’s kindergarten art show was on the day that the cast was set to appear on “Leno” to promote the series finale. Kudrow tried to pull out; the teacher offered to arrange a special viewing. Some years later, Julian was struggling in school while Kudrow was shooting a movie in New York. “They were, like, ‘Put him on medication,’ ” she recalled. “He’s not a plant! He’s a human being! His mom’s away! I thought, I need to be home. He needs an advocate.”

For many years, she and Bucatinsky worked out of a rented house in West Hollywood, along with Bucatinsky’s husband, Roos, who directed the first season of “Web Therapy” from the garage before they moved to a soundstage in Van Nuys. The trio has a tradition of getting together for game nights: Boggle, Shanghai rummy. “Lisa introduced me and Don to Mexican Train dominoes, which had been taught to her by Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, who were a couple at the time,” Bucatinsky said. In 2018, their company adapted an out-of-print board game, 25 Words or Less, into a syndicated game show, hosted by Meredith Vieira, which is now entering its eighth season.

On the new season of “The Comeback,” Valerie and Bucatinsky’s character, Billy, are executive producers of “How’s That?!,” the A.I. sitcom. One morning, I met Kudrow in a conference room in Beverly Hills. She was in producer mode, wearing a blazer and glasses, reviewing dailies from the season première on a laptop. She popped a piece of nicotine gum and pulled up a scene in which Valerie is hosting a new podcast called “Cherish the Time.” Grasping for material, Valerie babbles about catching “The Goodbye Girl” on TV, as her Gen Z social-media assistant (played by Ella Stiller, the daughter of Ben) watches blankly. “I don’t like this take,” Kudrow said, clicking around. There was a great take in which Stiller had stifled a yawn, she remembered—but where was it? “That’s the one!” Kudrow said. “Did you see that? So subtle and good.”

To bone up on A.I., she had talked to her nephews who work in tech. On her phone, she showed me an A.I. clip that someone had sent her, of Phoebe and Kurt Cobain playing a grunge version of Phoebe’s signature tune, “Smelly Cat.” “I’m a little creeped out,” she said. “I hope nobody thinks there was some point in time when we were all sitting around with Kurt Cobain. He died before we even started! That’s the part that feels so dangerous to me, that we can’t trust anything that we see.”

She moved on to a scene in which Valerie gets stunt-cast as the lead in “Chicago” on Broadway. She scribbled notes on a pad, chuckling at Valerie’s cheery obliviousness, then closed her laptop. Saying goodbye to the character was difficult. When she recalled shooting the final scene, tears welled up. “That was hard,” she said. “Because I do love her now.” Ridiculous as Valerie Cherish is, she and Kudrow have lived parallel lives: both are sitcom stars turned producers, still weathering the cruel demands of show business into their sixties. “She’s always taken care of herself, whether it looks like it or not,” Kudrow said, of her alter ego. “She knew what the rules and limitations were for her and would work around them. And wouldn’t stop. And didn’t care. Throw however many pies in her face as you want.” ♦