The Comeback will stage one final comeback for Valerie Cherish—how’s that? 20 years after the cult hit first aired and a decade sinceThe Comeback‘s first comeback, series co-creator and star Lisa Kudrow once again donned her strawberry blonde wig to sit for a talking head with her documentary crew. Fans will appreciate the meta layers of Valerie announcing that she’s “got a new show, the Sisyphean struggle of the sitcom actor who has to repeatedly stage her own comeback. “This is the last one, alright? Last time. Never doing this again,” she says over and over, getting frustrated with the amount of takes but also warning the audience that the curtain is closing for The Comeback‘s “final season.”
In a press release, Kudrow and Michael Patrick King (And Just Like That…) shared, “Valerie Cherish has found her way back to the current television landscape. Neither of us are surprised she did.” HBO & Max’s Executive Vice President of Comedy Programming Amy Gravitt added in her own statement, “No matter what the industry throws at her, Valerie Cherish is a survivor,”: On the 20th Anniversary of her debut, Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow have brilliantly scripted her return to HBO and we can’t wait to see that.” Dan Bucatinsky (who plays Valerie’s publicist Billy Stanton), Laura Silverman (the reality TV show producer Jane Benson), and Damian Young (Valerie’s husband Mark Berman) are all signed on for the third season. A release date has not yet been announced.
It’s only appropriate for such a prescient program to return in 2025; The Comeback has always had an incisive eye for satirizing the evolution of the entertainment industry. Checking in once a decade allows the show to capitalize on that unique perspective and mine humor out of how a B-list TV actor would navigate the extreme tide shifts in the 21st century of Hollywood. The only downside of this revival news is the idea that it’s going to be “final.” Why deprive us of the possibility to keep checking in with an aging Valerie as she fights for relevance in an increasingly cynical and tech-forward media landscape? Then again, Valerie insists in the teaser it’s her last take, but she keeps giving in and doing more anyway—and is anything ever truly “final” when it comes to valuable Hollywood IP? At the very least fans have one more Comeback to look forward to.
