Lisa Kudrow criticises sitcoms for being ‘too afraid'

Lisa Kudrow has some strong opinions about the state of modern sitcoms, and the Friends star is not holding back.

Speaking to Lily Tomlin for Interview Magazine while promoting the return of The Comeback, Kudrow said she finds herself largely uninterested in new multi-camera comedies because they have lost the edge that made the classics so memorable. 

"I wish they were evolving," she said when asked whether sitcoms were dying or evolving. 

"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 feel like we've been too afraid to make jokes that might make people uncomfortable."

When Tomlin pushed back, suggesting multi-cams are not exactly light on jokes, Kudrow argued it was about the quality and daring of those jokes rather than the quantity. 

"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."

It's a notable observation coming from someone who spent a decade on one of the most iconic multi-camera sitcoms ever made. 

Kudrow played Phoebe Buffay across all ten seasons of Friends alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and the late Matthew Perry, earning an Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy in 1998.

She also used the interview to revisit how Phoebe was perceived at the time. 

Fans consistently told her the character was "such a ditz", a reading she never agreed with. 

"Is she a ditz? To me, she wasn't," she said. "Someone who wasn't toeing the line… But she wasn't stupid."

Kudrow is currently back on screens in the third and final season of The Comeback, which premiered last month on HBO. 

In it, her character Valerie takes the lead role in a new sitcom secretly being written by an AI programme, a premise that feels rather well-timed given the current conversations around artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry.