The Comeback’s shaggy, despairing, hilarious, and sometimes baldly sentimental third season laughs through the Hollywood-pocalypse.
Photo: Erin Simkin/HBO
In the same way that the Romans saw the return of Halley’s Comet as a harbinger of cataclysmic change, maybe people in Hollywood should consult their local soothsayer when Valerie Cherish’s red wig appears on the horizon. The fictional ’90s sitcom star played by Lisa Kudrow has been around for three major shifts in the television industry. In 2005, on the first season of The Comeback, which Kudrow co-created with Sex and the City’s Michael Patrick King, Cherish threw herself into the then-burgeoning world of reality TV, taping a meta show about her attempt to return to sitcom stardom. (Cherish initially thinks she’ll be a star of the sexy-young-thing comedy Room and Bored but is cast as the marmish landlord, Aunt Sassy.) The first season’s view of the deprivations of reality TV captured the apocalyptic feeling of Hollywood in the early aughts, the sense that reality, cheaper to film than a standard network show, would mean the end of jobs. The show’s cringe comedy was trendsetting, too — the image of Valerie voting in a cupcake outfit is more exquisitely painful to behold than anything on The Office — and perhaps because of its acid tone, it wasn’t picked up for a second season by HBO.
Once the show accumulated enough of a cult audience, it came back in 2014, prescient in its own way about the industry’s pivot toward “prestige.” Amid the rise of auteur-driven antihero TV, Valerie signed up for a Louie-esque self-lacerating dramedy written by her old nemesis and Room and Bored showrunner, Paulie G. (Lance Barber). The season came out before Me Too reporting made rumors about creators like Louie C.K. explicit, but it’s clearly soaked in an awareness of what guys like him were getting away with under the cloak of genius. Still, Valerie and her plastered-on smile soldiered through humiliation, whether self-inflicted or not, and in the near-perfect ending for the second season, developed something like a soul, leaving the Emmy Awards behind to spend time with her beloved hairstylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, who was ill as the series filmed and died in 2017). The news that, after more than a decade, Kudrow and King decided to bring Valerie back for a new season is cause for both celebration and anxiety. What horrors await her, us, and the rest of the entertainment industry?
Premiering the first of eight episodes on Sunday, March 22, The Comeback’s shaggy, despairing, hilarious, and sometimes baldly sentimental third season spends its first two episodes running through all the horsemen of the Hollywood-pocalypse. It catches up with Valerie, first in 2023 as she’s rehearsing a brief, disastrous run in the musical Chicago, which she abandons for reasons she tries to justify as benevolent, but mostly because she hasn’t rehearsed enough. (You could entertain yourself with an “identify the niche-famous gay guy” game throughout this season, beginning with the Chicago subplot, which includes ballet dancer Robbie Fairchild and Hadestown tall guy Timothy Hughes.) Once the show picks back up three years later, as Valerie’s grasping for relevance with a podcast and an Epix show nobody watched — “Too many apps,” she tends to mutter by way of excuse — we get to the meat of this season’s interest. A tech company, led by a slickly empty-eyed Andrew Scott, wants her to star in its AI-generated sitcom How’s That?!, in which she’d play the proprietor of a bed-and-breakfast. The kicker is that their data has landed on her as the perfect star for a program intended to be left on while people do other things on their phone. Valerie is algorithmically ideal for slop streaming television, perfectly mediocre. She tries to process that as a compliment, though in a perfect bit of layered, twitchy pain that passes across Kudrow’s face, you sense her fear and confusion in accepting this particular chalice. One of the great things about Kudrow’s interpretation of Valerie, an all-time television performance, is its semi-opacity — like an adolescent amphibian, you can always see partway through her skin toward what’s roiling underneath. But it’s not like her insides are any more true than the smile she puts on to face the world. Valerie is always both her id and her wig.
How’s That?! is an offer Valerie probably should refuse but can’t bring herself to — because of her ego, because she loves a catchphrase, and because, like so many other Comeback characters, she just wants to work. The season is colored by precarity, making it a darker and more honest riposte to the chummy Hollywood satire of The Studio. It also tends to be more didactic, for better and worse. Valerie’s longtime documentary director Jane (Laura Silverman) is now working a gig at Trader Joe’s after she lost her home in the Palisades Fire, but agrees to sign on for yet another round of filming with Valerie because she’s interested in blowing the whistle on the AI writing process. Sharon, the old casting director from Room and Bored (played by real-life casting director Marla Garlin), begs Valerie for a job on her new show when they run into each other at Soho House because she needs any kind of work. Valerie, newly obsessed with “collabs,” is more focused on trying to do a video with Sharon’s dining companion, Jane Fonda, who makes a cameo appearance on Valerie’s socials and The Comeback itself mostly so she can remind people to vote.
In the universe of The Comeback, there are a few from the old system who are comfortably well-off, like Fonda, or legendary sitcom director James Burrows, who often appears on the series as a voice of a reason, and is found here lounging by the pool when Valerie invades his home to ask him to direct her new show. Her publicist turned manager, Billy (Dan Bucatinsky, also an executive producer of the series), has become encased in a bubble of success, too, and is in the midst of floating off into rich-gay megalomania. Once named an exec producer of How’s That?!, he detaches from caring about the show’s many flaws and dreams of becoming a star in his own right by paying his way to attend fashion shows. (A rather specific satire.) But in Valerie’s Hollywood, most are hurting in small or large ways, or at least on the hunt for whatever might be a new stable income stream. Valerie’s husband, Mark (Damian Young), is out of work due to a Me Too–esque cancellation and is flailing his way through his own reality show about “finance dudes.” Valerie herself has a podcast she hosts with nobody else and is always suggesting that her social-media manager, Patience (Ella Stiller, always amusingly over it), film prospective collab videos with her favorite food from Trader Joe’s, or her driverless Waymo, just in case someone wants to reach out. Her AI sitcom’s showrunners, a (somehow straight) couple played by John Early and Abbi Jacobson, are worn down enough by the lack of work to go along with the premise that their third writer, “Al” (as in algorithm), just works remote and can magically come up with hundreds of generic alt-jokes on the fly.
The premise that Valerie must keep that AI secret from the rest of her cast, and from the industry as a whole, gives this season a solid comedic game and allows for the kind of misunderstandings and humiliations that are the meat and potatoes of classic situation comedy. In that way, the season’s interests are anxiously forward-looking and warmly retro. You could title an episode “The One Where Al Hallucinates” or “The One Where They Hit a Paywall” and capture the sorts of circumstances Valerie finds herself tripping through. The Comeback’s messaging on AI tends to be hamfisted, with a lot of reminders that the idiosyncrasies of writers can never be replaced, and that running a sitcom means employing dozens of hardworking people — I believe you! Also, you sound like a WGA flyer! But I became fond of it in the way you become fond of a very special episode of Saved by the Bell in which Jessie gets addicted to caffeine pills. Kudrow, who of course spent years on Friends, and King, who did his time in Murphy Brown and later ran 2 Broke Girls, are former admirals who have seen their vast, 22-episode-a-year domains dry up to the size of a kiddie pool. They deserve, if not pity, a little indulgence in their commemoration of an art form gone Aral Sea. In one of her sharpest lines, Valerie dismisses her Emmy-winning work in Paulie G’s prestige series. “Dramedies are easy!” She complains. “This is a comedy.”
That wistfulness for a bygone form applies to the third season’s loose formal structure. The show’s first two seasons stuck to the conceit that everything we saw was material for Jane’s documentary work, with her crew prying their way into Valerie’s private life by eavesdropping at doors or using security footage. Now, The Comeback’s cinematography is unmoored. We move between documentary shaky-cam, when Jane is present; footage of Valerie’s attempted social-media hits; and pure documentary-free “reality,” seeing Valerie as her private self, unencumbered by her sense of having to perform for a camera. It’s inconsistent, perhaps, but it gives the season a searching, restless quality. We’ve seen enough mockumentaries in the decades since The Comeback first premiered for that form to develop its own hacky conventions, and King and Kudrow seem to have realized that it would be logistically impossible, and annoying, to embrace the logical next step in ego-driven media and release a full season shot as vertical video. (Though it does feel likely that Valerie made a Quibi.) Instead, for what they insist is their final season, they’ve settled into another endangered form: the single-camera comedy. The choice reverses The Comeback’s gaze. For its first two seasons, the show was a Cassandra, anticipating the future with dread. Now, having seen that future come to pass, Valerie Cherish looks back and finds, somehow, a lot to love in what she has endured.
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