Saying goodbye is never easy, particularly if you’ve played a character for over 20 years, however intermittently.
Lisa Kudrow knows this well, after her and Michael Patrick King, the co-creators of HBO’s The Comeback, said farewell to Valerie Cherish, a character that started at The Groundlings and was first turned into a comedy series in 2005.
The show ended its third season with Cherish doing a piece to camera, helmed by Jane Benson, played by Lauren Silverman. The shot fades from black-and-white to color with Jane applauding how she’s fought for herself, against the big bad A.I. “What an evolution you’ve had,” Benson says.
Cherish does not agree with the premise. “I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up,” she says.
Speaking with Deadline at Sublime Primetime, an event hosted by the Writers Guild Foundation, Kudrow said she’s had seasoned actors ask her how she’s able to play such a character. “Valerie spun everything but believed it so it was pain-free and then realized that she does not accept humiliation. Oh my god, that’s an option? It was so revelatory,” she said.
“I also think Lisa wanted to make sure emotionally that we left Valerie with dignity,” added King.
But it wasn’t easy to film. The pair shot the scene on the last day of production.
“It was emotional,” added Kudrow. “We were on the Friends stage where I said goodbye to the most important 10 years.”
“We thought it’d be really great to film the last scene last on the last day, so that Friends and The Comeback is all ending on the exact same moment for Lisa, and then it’s one take. We were nuts. It was really, really emotional,” added King.
The pair were joined on stage by the creators of Hacks – Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky – who also had an emotional reaction to their show ending after five seasons.
The final season, which ended in May, sees Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance, tell Ava, played by Hannah Einbinder, that she’s got cancer and she’s going to travel to Switzerland for assisted suicide. But first, she wants a trip and after riffing on jokes about dying, Vance changes her mind and asks Ava to help her write another hour.
Aniello said, “I feel like I’ve almost been not admitting this. Now, I really am to a whole room of people, but like I desperately miss the characters, in a way that feels kind of pathetic.”
She added that the live event that they put together – Smart and Einbinder’s last tour of duty as the characters – was a way to keep the band together. “I think part of the reason we did that is just because we were kind of desperate to keep writing for them, and so it was really part of the grieving.”
Statsky admitted that it was hard to say goodbye. “It’s very hard to say goodbye to the people we made the show with, and [given] it was the first show the three of us created, we also very aware of what a privilege it is to have a show because to make a comedy right now is so unfortunately hard, but we also know it’s a privilege that we got to do it for five seasons, and so to say goodbye to that is really hard.”
The final episode was also a full-circle moment for the trio. They had rented an AirBnb in Paris in 2019 – where Statsky was filming the finale of The Good Place – and they realized they were shooting one of the final seasons on the same street, seven years later.
“We knew the show was about the grist between these two women of different generations, and that ultimately the thing that they would struggle with at the end would be life and death. It’s a story about these two women who are so different and don’t want to have anything to do with each other, who in the end can’t be without each other,” Downs said. “We did want to tell that story, but it was scary even until, honestly, the week before it aired. We were like, should we have ended at episode nine? Should we have gone out on a big happy thing? But yeah, it was a process getting there.”
The Comeback and Hacks are both nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series, where they are up against Abbott Elementary, The Chair Company, Widow’s Bay and Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat.
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