If you’re looking for proof that Lisa Kudrow is nowhere near as dopey as her character Phoebe was on Friends, look no further than her latest project, W
eb Therapy, which premiered on Showtime last night and airs Tuesdays at 11pm ET/PT. The improv-heavy series features Kudrow along with a rotating cast including Jane Lynch, Bob Balaban, Victor Garber, Lily Tomlin, Alan Cumming, former Friends costar Courteney Cox and others, and presents an insightful, witty sendup of the unregulated world of online business.
In the series, Kudrow plays Fiona Wallice, a clever, attractive woman whose brilliant new idea is to administer psychotherapy online via video chat — in three-minute sessions, instead of the usual 50 minutes that involves so much rambling on and on — for $25 per visit. (“You can use PayPal!”) Except that Fiona doesn’t have any kind of degree, license or training and isn’t really interested in healing anyone — she’s interested in herself, and in growing her new business venture. The results are amusingly catastrophic.
Kudrow is quick to point out that it’s not the show’s intent to indict therapy as a practice. “I just thought that things offered online — it’s hard to check them,” she says. “Because there are no regulations, really. Anything goes. So I just thought, ‘How hilarious’ — because the dumbest idea in the world would be to offer therapy online for three minutes. I know that online, people do a lot of tasks and they do watch some entertainment things when they’re at work because it only takes a short time. Everything’s shorter, and it goes faster, on the Internet — so I thought how funny, if someone thought it was a good idea to offer therapy, which really shouldn’t be shorter.”
Some of the series was initially produced as a series of online segments, and as a result, Kudrow has already received a certain amount of feedback about the show from various segments of the public. “It reminds them of people in politics, or just the way our society is,” she explains. “Everybody’s looking for a brand without actually having to do something. It comments on a lot of different things — the Internet and what goes on there, and how potentially unprotected people are. And because it’s such a huge field of participants, there are going to be a small number who find benefits, even though it’s just an outrageous proposal to treat people like that — online, for three-minute sessions. She’s sometimes, even, I think, just a little bit abusive.”
All of this could have resulted in some measure of fallout from the therapy community, but according to Kudrow, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. “They think that it’s hilarious, just because she’s doing it wrong,” she laughs. “We heard from classes that are teaching and training psychologists — they show Web Therapy — the task is to count however many transgressions there are.”
As much fun as Kudrow is having with the series, it’s obviously a business for her, and one she takes seriously. “There’s nothing really like it on TV, and I don’t know how it ever would have gotten on TV if we hadn’t shown them what it would be like — by having the freedom to do it on the Internet,” she asserts. “Because you can’t go into any network and pitch, ‘No, you just see computer screens — it’s just singles and doubles, and two-shots, and the whole thing is just conversations on computer screens,’” she laughs. “I don’t know how you’d ever sell that.”
These days, when she’s not playing Fiona or otherwise working on Web Therapy, she and her production company, Is or Isn’t Entertainment, shift gears to work on Who Do You Think You Are?, NBC’s genealogy series. “We’re not just producing it in name. We’re actually involved in the day to day,” she explains. “We’ve started our third season, so we’ve started to research people and see if there are any documents and information that we can put into 42 minutes of a show.”
In her downtime, Kudrow says she’s been catching up on some of her Masterpiece favorites from PBS, including South Riding and the original Upstairs Downstairs. “Because I was too young in the ’70s, I didn’t see the original series, so I just finished watching all of those DVDs. That was the best show ever made. … The time they take to explore things — it’s so worthwhile.”
Kudrow is obviously much brighter than the character with which she’s been so long associated, the bubble-headed Phoebe on Friends. But even playing a woman as horrible as Fiona Wallice, she doesn’t have any concerns about her public perception, and she’s content that people still project Phoebe’s lack of intelligence onto her. “I think Phoebe is the persona that is assigned to me now, and that’s fine,” she says. “It’s fine because I know who I am. My husband knows who I am, my son, my family — so everyone who needs to know who I am is done. And that’s kind of all that matters. Phoebe’s a nice person — that’s fine. She might be a little ditzy, but it’s actually great when a lot of people think you’re stupid, because they don’t insist on a lot from you. It’s easier.”
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Credit: Showtime
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