Kathryn Hahn to play Joan Rivers in new Showtime series

Variety says the show will primarily take place after the cancellation of Fox’s short-lived The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers and the death of her husband Edgar Rosenberg. Rivers’ career had hit a lull at that point, eventually coming back around with a second half that involved hosting her daytime talk show The Joan Rivers Show and becoming a fixture of awards show red carpets with her daughter, Melissa. The official pitch for the show describes it as “the awe-inspiring untold story of how Joan Rivers persevered through near suicide and professional abyss to rebuild herself and her career to become a global icon.” (The “untold” bit seems somewhat unlikely, since Rivers wrote and talked about her life a lot, but we’ll see.)

Variety doesn’t say when The Comeback Girl might premiere on Showtime, which generally means that it won’t be for a while. It also doesn’t say if Melissa Rivers is involved at all, which we are going to assume means that she is not.