NBC's Hit Me Baby One More Time, which I posted about yesterday, turned out to be pretty awful and more suited for desperate cable channels than network television (even a desperate network like NBC). Watching washed up musical acts perform actually isn't much fun, it's just kind of sad.

The one exception was hip hop group Arrested Development. They were the only act to give an energetic, comfortable performance on stage (on both their original hit Tennessee and their cover of Los Lonely Boys' grating Grammy nominated song Heaven, which was better than the original). Considering they were the only ones who seemed like they should still be recording today it wasn't much of a surprise to see them win the evening's "competition."

The same sense of desperation and resulting viewer discomfort is mined for laughs in HBO's new reality/sit-com parody The Comeback, and the results are very mixed.

The brainchild of Friends star Lisa Kudrow and Sex and the City showrunner Michael Patrick King, The Comeback presents "raw footage" from a network television reality show that follows a minor 90s sit-com star (played by Kudrow) as she returns to the world of TV comedy. It's a scripted show about the making of an unscripted show about an actress starring on a scripted show, if that makes any sense.

Kudrow is worth watching but, after seeing the first two episodes, it's not entirely clear if the same thing can be said for the show. The series is already racking up mostly negative notices from TV critics (including the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times and TV Guide) ahead of its Sunday night premiere.

Pretty much everyone points out that HBO already has too many inside Hollywood shows, which they do (The Comeback is paired with Hollywood sleazeball comedy Entourage, an often grating series which some critics inexplicably insist is "charming"). And how can your Average Joe Viewer possibly relate to jokes about upfronts and agents, the Zone diets and veteran sit-com director James Burrows playing himself?

But HBO doesn't program for mass audiences, they program shows that are creatively and/or artistically interesting, and The Comeback fits that bill just fine.

The show's main problem isn't that it's too inside Hollywood, it's that it's too singularly focused on Kudrow's shallow, desperate, insecure main character. That works for at least one episode, primarily because Kudrow is an uncommonly gifted comedic performer, but by the second episode the series begins to feel a bit too narrow. There's a fairly large ensemble cast, but everyone takes a back seat to the star. For the show to work it's going to have to allow the supporting characters some room to grow. Even Larry David doesn't try to carry Curb Your Enthusiasm on his own.

But it will be interesting to see how The Comeback progresses. It's possible that over the course of a season Kudrow and King will wind up telling a reasonably compelling complete story. Following their respective successes with Friends and Sex and the City, they both could've done pretty much whatever they wanted to. And they came up with a very quirky, alternative show that clearly aims to stretch them both artistically.

Even if the show winds up a failure, it will be a noble one.