Fiona Wallice is affected, self-entitled and narcissistic. She is a former businesswoman who stumbled into therapy and then when she found other people's lives too tedious to tolerate, she modified her job into a new "treatment modality," she calls "Web Therapy." Give her three minutes and she'll give you ... something, even if it's just further confusion.
Fiona is the character Lisa Kudrow developed alongside Don Roos and partner Dan Bucatinsky for Web Therapy, an Internet series that bowed on L/Studio in three-minute bursts in 2008, and has now been converted into a cable series for Showtime by combining webisodes and fleshing out previously unseen aspects of Fiona's personal life.
At the show's heart is Kudrow, who spends nary a minute off-screen. Web Therapy (Tuesday, 11/10c, Showtime) finds Kudrow doing that thing that is uniquely hers...
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I've said this before and I'll say it again: This show is a parody of the behind-the-scenes life of a has-been actress trying to make a comeback in Hollywood, but the reason I enjoy it so much is that it's so realistic. I see this type of stuff happening all the time here in L.A. This episode was about how stars yearn so desperately for publicity. If they're not on a magazine cover, they want to hire a new publicist. It was great that Billy, the publicist Valerie hired, was played by Dan Bucatinksy, a good friend of Lisa Kudrow and her costar in two awesome films: All Over the Guy (which Dan also wrote) and The Opposite of Sex (which was written and directed by Dan's boyfriend, Don Roos, who also just directed Lisa in Happy Endings, which I still have to see). Got all of that? So I knew I'd love Dan. Billy literally pushing people and Valerie's look of concern when Billy told her he just left PMK to start his own publicity
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If it weren't for that unmistakable voice and a trace of comic body language, it would almost be hard to recognize Lisa Kudrow as Mamie in Happy Endings (in theaters now). Of course, that's because we don't understand the craft of acting and think she really is our Friend Phoebe. But as Happy director Don Roos proved in 1997's The Opposite of Sex, Kudrow has the chops to play a smart, damaged, multidimensional woman. Mamie is an abortion counselor searching for the son she had as a teenager with her stepbrother and gave up for adoption — and there's not a New Age-y bone in her body."He is the first director [not to cast me in a "Phoebe" role], and based on what I don't know," Kudrow says of Roos, who became her close friend after Opposite. "Maybe he saw reservoirs of pain in Phoebe. He said
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