If you’ve been seeing Lisa Kudrow’s name a lot in entertainment news headlines and on Twitter, make no mistake – The Comeback is back.
There’s no questioning the fact that Kudrow is sitcom royalty. Between her smash-hit, era-defining series Friends and her once-per-decade meta comedy The Comeback, Kudrow has enough cred to speak from a place of expertise on all matters situational comedy, especially since the latter show is, itself, a satire of the TV industry and the hilarious people who manage to hack it in show business.
The Comeback Season Three premiered late last month as Kudrow and her team began to tackle the complexities of modern comedy and the rise of artificial intelligence in the TV industry. This season, Kudrow’s character Valerie Cherish faces an unprecedented opportunity and a big decision after she’s offered the opportunity to star in the first fully AI-written sitcom in TV history.
But in case that synopsis for the final installment of The Comeback wasn’t attention-grabbing enough, Kudrow’s press tour in support of the new season provided the necessary controversy to get all eyes on her and her show.
In talks with The Independent and Interview Magazine respectively, Kudrow got the clicks flowing by alleging that “nobody cared about me” when she was labeled as “the sixth friend” during the original run of Friends, then declaring that modern sitcom writers are “too afraid” of sensitivity issues to write jokes that are actually funny.
Now, Kudrow’s comments are the talk of the town and everyone in TV is taking note – look out for new episodes of The Comeback every Sunday.
To be clear, Kudrow’s comments about being “the sixth friend” during her interview with The Independent don’t come off quite as self-pitying within the original context as they do in the celebrity.land headline. Kudrow was specifically talking about how she felt she was treated by her talent agency during her run on Friends when she labeled herself as the least important cast member on the show.
“There was no vision for me, and no expectations about the kind of career I could have,” Kudrow said of her representation at the time. “There was just, like, ‘Boy is she lucky she got on that show.’”
As for her comments on the sitcom genre in 2026, Kudrow’s full words were just as critical and un-self-aware as they sounded on Twitter. During Kudrow’s talk with fellow comedy great Lily Tomlin for Interview Magazine, the latter legend asked the former if she feels that sitcoms are evolving, or if she thinks they’re dying.
“I wish they were evolving,” Kudrow admitted, “30 Rock and Seinfeld and Friends were really funny and really well written. But I’m not drawn to new sitcoms that are multi-camera in front of an audience because I’m not buying it. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve seen too many single-camera sitcoms—I think we need to get back to being able to tell jokes. I feel like we’ve been too afraid to make jokes that might make people uncomfortable.”
Kudrow continued of the dearth of solid sitcom punchlines, “The really good ones, they’re not tame jokes. They’re jokes that are kind of, ‘I can’t believe you just said that.’ Comedy is about surprise. You need things you didn’t see coming.”
The Comeback certainly supports Kudrow’s credibility on the subject, as her character Valerie Cherish isn’t afraid to make people uncomfortable in her unscrupulous pursuit of her own self-interest. But Kudrow slipping Friends, a famously tame, multi-camera sitcom, into a list of boundary-pushers like 30 Rock and Seinfeld absolutely deserves the entirely unsurprising roasting that fans of the other shows are now giving her on social media.
But ultimately, all of this is just good press for a good show that’s doing more to advance the sitcom genre than all the Friends-haters on Twitter who jumped at the chance to give Kudrow some grade-A engagement. Just like Valerie Cherish, Kudrow knows exactly how to play the game in the modern era, and little incendiary interview nuggets like these are how shows stay relevant in the modern media landscape.
Basically, the “sixth friend” is a lot smarter than the audience (and her agents) may have thought she was.
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