When the secret spills about “How’s That?!,” there’s a mini-rebellion among the crew. But it quickly fizzles out. You can quit in protest, but there’s always someone else needy enough — even needier now, because of this very crisis — to swallow the qualms, take the job, sign the N.D.A. Maybe the most outspoken if cynical voices are Josh and Mary (John Early and Abbi Jacobson), the writers hired to miserably babysit the A.I., but by midseason they’ve cut their losses and left.
Can anyone stand against this? Well, unions might, as they tried to do in the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes that provide the jumping-off point for the season. But the postscript — in which “How’s That?!” eventually becomes digitally written and acted — doesn’t hold out a ton of hope.
WILKINSON I do think, if nothing else, the A.I. plot does a good job of showing us what humans are good at. One of my very favorite scenes in this season comes when Paulie G. is on set, diagnoses instantly what isn’t working about a scene in which a man berates Valerie — and in so doing, describes why we all hated Paulie G. in Season 1 — and goes to work fixing it. It’s like watching, well, an artist. He may hate sitcoms; he clearly hates sitcoms. But he knows just what to do to make a sitcom scene work, and it’s a pleasure to watch him do it, and even he has to admit he had fun.
That is what’s kind of great about “The Comeback”: It’s not clear that any of the television being made on this show, from “Room and Bored” to “Seeing Red” to “How’s That?!” to the very dreadful-sounding “Judge’s Table,” is any good. But there is some artistry going into it, some craft, and “Al” can only imitate it, at best. Even Valerie, whose interest in her TV career seems motivated primarily by a need to be seen and loved by people rather than lofty ideas about the craft of acting, is good at what she does; James Burrows, the great TV director who plays himself on the show and was a big part of Kudrow’s own start in television, tells her as much.
Then again, with the possible exception of “Seeing Red” (and, well, “Mrs. Hatt”?), all of the TV Valerie does is deeply derivative. And derivative work is just the kind of thing that A.I. will be able to rip off easily. “How’s That?!” is, after all, the consummate laundry-folding show.
