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‘The Comeback’ Turns 20: Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King on Early Criticism, Cult-Classic Status and Whether There Will Ever Be a Season 3

Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King discuss making 'The Comeback' for HBO, one of the century's funniest TV comedies, for its 20th anniversary.

It came with lofty expectations attached: The series was a collaboration between Lisa Kudrow, of “Friends,” and Michael Patrick King, who’d run “Sex and the City.” Both of those shows’ sentimental and sweet-natured finales, both of which had aired in the previous year, loomed large in memory. After its first-season finale, in which Valerie achieves celebrity after having utterly humiliated herself on reality TV, the series was put on ice, canceled after Kudrow and King lost their respective Emmy races for acting and directing. In 2014, “The Comeback” returned for a revival season, in which Valerie, still chasing fame, attempts to sell Andy Cohen a pilot only to be drawn into “difficult man”-centered prestige cable, a world in which she fits even less well than reality TV.

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