Coming Back Is Hard To Do

By James Poniewozik

F Scott Fitzgerald told us there are no second acts in American lives. Fortunately, TV is not life. And ever since Ozzy Osbourne's and Jessica Simpson's comebacks, TV has been doling out second and third acts like Halloween candy. Eccentric Charlie's Angel Farrah Fawcett, p.r. queen Lizzie Grubman and gossip-beset Britney Spears have done reality shows. Kirstie Alley responded to being the butt--so to speak--of tabloid fat jokes on Showtime's sitcom Fat Actress. This summer scandal magnets Tommy Lee and Bobby Brown remind us who they are on NBC and Bravo, while next fall Martha Stewart further pays her debt to society on The Apprentice.

Then there's Valerie Cherish, whom you'll recall as the star of the seminal late-'80s, early-'90s sitcom I'm It. O.K., you won't recall her: she's a character, played by ex-Friend Lisa Kudrow, on the HBO sitcom The Comeback (Sundays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.). But you've seen her kind a lot lately: a celebrity desperate to get back in the spotlight. She keeps her old TV Guide cover and a portrait of her Leno appearance framed in her house like a shrine to a former, dead self. She gets a chance to land a network sitcom--playing the prudish aunt on a lame-brained sex comedy--if she'll also do a reality series about her comeback. She signs up because, she says, "Reality TV is the reality of TV."

Kudrow has a different take. "Reality," she says, "is humiliation TV." Humiliation--how much of it a person will take for fame--is the point of The Comeback. Kudrow invented a similar character years ago, when she was in the Groundlings improv group. After Friends, she called Michael Patrick King, recently executive producer of Sex and the City. They decided to put Valerie in the two worlds most treacherous for a 40-year-old actress: reality and sitcoms. "The sitcom world is male-dominated," says King, "and sometimes the target is women."

Kudrow, 41, only a year out of TV's most popular sitcom, is not exactly a comeback candidate. But, she says, "I have had moments I worked through years ago where I felt I had to be sexier, to lose weight or that I was supposed to get on the cover of such-and-such magazine." As King puts it: "Forty-year-old doctor? Great. Forty-year-old professor? Great. Forty-year-old TV star? Dinosaur." So Valerie's hyper-self-consciousness--she's constantly signaling "time out" to the cameras during uncomfortable moments--is like an animal's defense reflex. Her image is her life. The reality crew manipulates too: the producer makes her repeat a line, suggesting, "I just think your reality could be a little more excited."

The scenes will ring true to anyone who has wondered how much reality a celebrity reality show can actually reveal. It's hard to imagine Martha Stewart relinquishing control of her pruning shears, let alone her public image. It's a delicate act, though; these shows succeed by offering at least the illusion of access and authenticity. Fans want to feel the celebrities have earned redemption by abasing and laughing at themselves; we need to look down on them before we return them to their pedestals.

So if you can't hide your problems, at least disclose them on your terms. Take singer Bobby Brown and wife Whitney Houston: she just got out of rehab; two members of his entourage were stabbed at a restaurant last week. In Being Bobby Brown (debuts June 30), we meet them in the middle of a marital-bonding experience: his court hearing for allegedly beating her, a charge that Houston has denied. (We learn that their daughter gets out of school on daddy's "court days," like other kids do on snow days.) Brown has said he signed up for the show to counter his tabloid image, but also to boost an R&B career that peaked in the Reagan Administration. "I'm just an entertainer, man, that is trying hard to get back in," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

True, baring all on TV is a great way to become successful--at baring all on TV. But it won't necessarily sell any CDs. For every Jessica Simpson, who this summer stars in the Dukes of Hazzard movie, there's an Anna Nicole Smith, who's shilling for Trim Spa. Fat Actress put Alley on magazine covers, but then its ratings plummeted like her weight.

The Comeback knows how quickly and badly this story can end. But this HBO sitcom can be self-serving and smug about those awful networks and their barbaric reality shows. When Valerie meets Kim Fields (The Facts of Life) and Marilu Henner (Taxi) playing themselves at an audition, Fields sniffs, "Who is so desperate for a comeback that they actually want cameras to follow them around all day?" Fields, we should note, once did an episode of the E! dating show Star Dates.

What gives The Comeback its, well, reality is Kudrow's layered performance; she gives sympathy and poignance to what could have been a one-joke dimwit. Valerie is the Willy Loman of sitcoms, trying to will herself into the second half of her career on a blow-dry and a nervous smile. When it gets past its preaching about reality TV and show biz, The Comeback hits a universal theme: Valerie is being forced, despite her struggle, to recognize the truth about herself. During a spat, she tells her sitcom's producer how much better she was treated on I'm It. "You know what?" he says. "You're not It anymore."

For just a second, hurt and defeat play across her face. Then she plasters on a smile and moves on. For the reality that matters is not what she feels; it's what the camera records. And as long as she can keep that little red light on above the lens, she can be It for just a little longer. --With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles