WEST HOLLYWOOD — In 2005, HBO aired a series called “The Comeback,” starring Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish, a self-absorbed, middle-aged television actress who blindly throws herself into the privacy-invading world of reality TV. Though HBO pulled the plug after one season, Valerie — the awkward beating heart of the biting half-hour comedy — seemed to live on. For nine years, by way of YouTube clips, word of mouth and a DVD set available on Amazon for a reasonable $7.45, the popularity of “The Comeback” only continued to build.

“People made an effort to find it,” said Kudrow, who created the show with Michael Patrick King. “A lot of writers, artists, people I respect, would say to me: ‘It’s crazy that it didn’t get picked up. It must have been a mistake.’” The show even ended up on Entertainment Weekly’s “10 Best TV Shows of the Decade” list.

But it’s now a television world in which Netflix restarts an offbeat but canceled broadcast sitcom (“Arrested Development”) and Fox reverses a cancellation to create a limited series (“24”). And so, nearly a decade after Season 1, “The Comeback” is itself making a comeback, getting an eight-episode Season 2 that premieres Sunday.

When Kudrow and King were called in for a meeting this year at HBO, the network’s president for programming, Michael Lombardo, told the pair, “I miss Valerie,” and asked if they knew of a way to bring back the show. “Within two or three minutes, it was clear that this was an idea that was meant to happen,” Lombardo said. “It was as if they’d been thinking about it for the last year.”

Afterward, Kudrow said, she and King were in a daze as they headed to the parking lot. “We were sort of staring at each other with tears in our eyes, like happy ones, going, ‘What just happened?’” Kudrow said.

King remembered: “We hugged for a really long time. And we’re not effusive people.”

Once the miracle of resurrection wore off, the reality sunk in. Kudrow’s days are filled working as an executive producer of the TLC genealogy series, “Who Do You Think You Are?” and as a writer, executive producer and star of Showtime’s “Web Therapy.” King is the show runner on the CBS sitcom “2 Broke Girls.” So the new “Comeback” episodes had to be made during King’s hiatus. In Season 1, Valerie Cherish was trying to claw her way back into the spotlight by holding down two jobs: playing the marginalized Aunt Sassy on a youth-oriented sitcom called “Room and Bored,” while allowing a camera crew to record her daily humiliations for a minutiae-mad companion reality series called “The Comeback.”

When the HBO show returns, viewers will find that Valerie has adjusted to a more modern-day form of celebrity. “We start off with her perfectly accepting that being famous for being famous is a valid, legitimate career,” said Kudrow, suddenly assuming Valerie’s erect posture and shiny down-home twang. “That’s how it is now.” She added, in her normal voice: “Then she stumbles into a real acting job. I loved that.”

Much like the first season of “The Comeback,” Season 2 has no laugh track, is shot to look like the unedited footage of a reality crew and brings back many of same characters — Valerie’s wealthy husband (Damian Young), her hairdresser-sidekick (Robert Michael Morris), a truculent show runner (Lance Barber) and a deadpan reality television producer (Laura Silverman). Asked about the possibility of a Season 3, Lombardo said, “I would figure it out in a heartbeat.”

Season 2 offers Kudrow the chance to suggest that almost a decade later, Valerie has wised up, albeit subtly.

“Lisa is always sending out a real vivid, complicated mix of many things,” King said, describing Kudrow’s ability to convey a dozen emotions at once. “Valerie isn’t dumb, and she knows what’s happening to her. She’s spinning, saving herself, getting out. She’s always aware. She’s a beautifully realized sad, tragic clown.”