July 17--Lisa Kudrow, whose HBO meta-comedy "The Comeback" returned this season after a nine-year hiatus, has waited a long time to hear the show's named called on Emmys nomination morning.
So you can understand if her enthusiasm takes hold in unlikely places.
As in, really private places.
"I realized [I got] the nomination when I got a text from [co-star] Dan Bucatinsky that said 'Yay, and then more texts that said 'Yay' and then I got one from Matt LeBlanc that said 'Yay,'" she recalled. "I was in the bathroom when I got that one."
Kudrow was nominated for lead actress in a comedy Thursday, following her nomination in the category at the 2006 ceremony. The show had run for one cult-hit season in the summer of 2005 before being resurrected in 2014.
The telephonic "Friends" reunion on Thursday seemed fitting for the "Comeback" star and co-creator, whose show often riffs on the lives, real and perceived, of Hollywood celebrities.
Kudrow and Michael Patrick King center "The Comeback" on self-absorbed actress Valerie Cherish (Kudrow), who in the first go-round starred in a fictional reality series titled "The Comeback" as she sought to regain past glory This season the show went even further in the meta department by having Valerie star as a version of herself named Mallory in a new roman-a-clef series called "Seeing Red." That program airs--where else?--on HBO.
"The first thing we knew is that 'The Comeback' [the fictional one] was over and we had to fly straight into that truth," Kudrow said of her and King's thought process. "And once that happened, we thought 'why not an HBO show?' It's kind of meta meta meta."
There may be a life-imitating-art quality at work in other ways as well. This season Cherish was nominated for, and then won, an Emmy for her performance in "Seeing Red." (Kudrow said that some of the more hard-core meta turns might be dropped when "The Comeback" returns for a third season, as-yet undated).
The actress said the Emmys attention for "The Comeback" lands differently than it did with "Friends," for which she won a supporting actress Emmy in 1998; after all, she plays a more key role behind the camera in her current program.
But she said that even after all these years, people still conflate the Valerie character with her own life -- and theirs.
"I have people who ask me [if it's based on my life], but actually I get a lot of actors who walk up to me with fear in their eyes and say 'Is it me?'" she said. "But I'm nice about it. I tell them it's not, and that it's a composite."
steve.zeitchik@latimes.com
