LOS ANGELES, March 21 (UPI) — In The Comeback Season 3, premiering Sunday at 10:30 p.m. EDT on HBO, Lisa Kudrow returns to the Warner Bros. lot and the very stage where she filmed Friends. On the show, Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) stars in a sitcom written by AI

The AI storyline is speculative, but the fictional sitcom films on Stage 24, which housed Friends from 1994 – 2004. At a recent Los Angeles press conference, Kudrow, 62, said it was inevitable The Comeback would finally reference Friends.

“Couldn’t help it,” Kudrow said. “We were shooting on the Friends stage.”

The first joke is that Valerie ignores the legacy of Stage 24. A real plaque on the exterior lists all the movies and television shows that filmed there in the history of Warner Bros.

“She was only looking at the movies on the plaque,” Kudrow said. “She didn’t even see the TV shows and just like, ‘We’re going to be the first hit for Stage 24.’ Right, Friends was a hit, Mike & Molly and whatever else you see there.”

Valerie almost even names Kudrow’s breakthrough show. The Comeback co-creator and writer Michael Patrick King, 71, delighted in interrupting Valerie.

“We were mostly interested in how close we could get to Valerie actually saying the word ‘frie-,'” King said. “It was her saying ‘frie-‘ and then Abby Jacobsen goes ‘too much talking’ just as she’s about to. That was the third rail we were touching.”

Another Friends connection came in the casting of Kudrow’s son, Julian Stern, as a character who appears later in the season. Stern was born in 1998 at the end of the fourth season of Friends.

“We’re on Stage 24 and I have a picture of him at 2 years old in the craft service kitchen washing his hands,” Kudrow said. “There he is, back and acting and part of this finale.”

The Comeback began in 2005 and introduced Valerie allowing reality TV cameras to chronicle her return to TV glory. Kudrow and King only revisited The Comeback for a second season in 2014.

Kudrow said the emergence of AI felt like an issue of a magnitude worthy of a third season.

“Just as reality TV was sort of the almost extinction event at the time for scripted television, it’s the same feeling about AI,” Kudrow said.

HBO CEO Casey Bloys agreed, but wanted Kudrow and King to hurry up. Kudrow was not worried a real AI-written series would premiere before The Comeback Season 3.

“No, I think that’s a ways off,” Kudrow said, believing the world is still “in the what if phase.”

King was a little more concerned.

“Our goal was to get on the air before a studio admitted they were using AI,” King said. “Now, I think that’s clear unless five days from now somebody suddenly admits they’ve secretly written a show.”

The Comeback uses Hollywood as the microcosm, but King said the AI story reflects the world at large.

“We felt that the world may have escalated to the point of the desperation that Valerie was in in the first season,” King said. “Not because of AI but because of where the world is and people desperate to get a job and keep a job.”

Season 3 had to address real-life loss. Robert Michael Morris, who played Valerie’s confidante Mickey, died in 2017.

Valerie pays tribute to Mickey in Season 3 by finding his ashes in storage and spreading them. King said that since Morris died between seasons, his character’s death could be addressed retrospectively, too.

“The one thing Lisa kept repeating over and over again, she’s going to make me cry, was that Valerie designed the box,” King said. “She had enough of a connection to celebrate him at the end.”

With decades between each Comeback season, both King and Kudrow have ruled out a fourth season in 2036. They said the finale of Season 3 is intended as a series finale, despite further questions about a return.

“But it’s a trilogy,” Kudrow said.

King said he considered it unlikely that another major inspiration like AI would come along then.

“We’re not doing a quadrilogy,” King said. “It took us 11 years for the key to show up, so come on.”