The last time The Comeback came back, it was 2014. Valerie Cherish had just won an Emmy for her role in the prestige HBO drama, Seeing Red, a docudrama series based on the production of her raunchy 2000s sitcom, Room And Board. The first two seasons of Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King’s knowing Hollywood satire arrived at inflection points in the TV ecosystem and used Valerie’s relationship with the camera to sell it. In the first season in 2005, she was the star of a reality TV show that chronicled the D-list sitcom star’s return to the generous applause of a live-studio audience. Filmed by Valerie’s artistically frustrated producer Jane (Laura Silverman), the show presented “raw footage” of the show-within-the-show, tossing Kudrow and King the keys to the perfect vehicle for traversing an industry on the brink of collapse. Appropriately, the unexpected second season evolved with the times. Swapping sitcoms for difficult-men prestige dramas, Seeing Red reflected Breaking Bad’s Skyler complex by leaning into an emasculated antihero that audiences sympathize with at the expense of the woman he mistreats.
Season two ended on a high with a rare win for Valerie Cherish. Seeing Red earned her an Emmy nomination. But on Emmy night, as the ceremony was about to begin, Valerie chose to skip her acceptance speech so that she could check in on her longtime personal hairstylist and cheerleader Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) in the hospital. As she leaves the ceremony, something unusual happens: The mockumentary aesthetics fall away, allowing us to see Valerie in a new light. It can’t be stressed enough how revelatory and emotional the switch is, with Kudrow delving even deeper into the mineral-rich mine de Cherish. It was a perfect ending.
However, as is usually the case in entertainment, perfection is not a reason to let something be. Somehow, Valerie Cherish has returned, with a third and supposedly final season of The Comeback. There is no better tour guide for the sinking world of show business than the Emmy-winning survivor. Yet the show, at least in this opening episode, is playing a slightly different game, teasing one season in prologue that morphs into something entirely different and more conventional halfway through. Valerie is the same, but the show has drastically changed, trading its mockumentary perspective for a somewhat diminished Curb Your Enthusiasm-style meta comedy.
Nevertheless, co-writers Kudrow and King (the director of the opener) know exactly where Valerie Cherish would end up nine years after her Emmy win: Chicago on Broadway. Amid the 2023 SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, an out-of-work Cherish assumes the part of Roxie, a plum role for stunt casting that gave reality divas like Ariana Madix and Lisa Rinna a chance to tread the boards. If Larry David hadn’t already done that exact season of television more than 20 years ago, Valerie preparing for opening night would be a suitable comeback for Jane, who’s indentured to Valerie for $25,0000, to film. Giving the season a little modern flair and a new lens to see her, Valerie hired a social-media person, Patience (Ella Stiller), who grabs marketing footage of Valerie. But almost as soon as Valerie gets in her wig, she does something unprecedented: She quits the show. Not only that, due to Patience’s positive COVID test, Jane walks off, too. It’s also the moment The Comeback quits its mockumentary aesthetic and breaks format.
No longer anchored to Jane’s camera, an unspecified third-person perspective takes over as Valerie returns to Los Angeles and hits the picket line for a photo op with Fran Drescher. Though the show is moving into a more conventional comedic mode, the strikes provide it with a way to establish a place and time, namely the start of AI-pocalypse that’s destroying Hollywood. This really comes into play when the show breaks format again and does a three-year time jump that sends us to the present. This season opener really is not precious with what made The Comeback The Comeback.
In 2026, Valerie and her husband, Mark (Damian Young), have moved out of her fecal-matter-covered abode in Brentwood and into a new apartment in West Hollywood. She has a podcast, Cherish The Time, to discuss, of all things, The Goodbye Girl and a role in an indie movie by an up-and-coming director.
Valerie has a lot of unpaid labor on her resume, and Kudrow is funny as ever, but the show really seems to be using its tagline, “It’s time to face reality,” as a thesis statement. Much of the episode is Valerie when the cameras are not on her, which deprives it of some comedic spark. There are some classic Comeback surveillance shots of Mark and Valerie in bed, but those aren’t for public consumption. This is a personal-security camera that the couple seemingly wants in their bedroom so they can record hand jobs. The prevalence of smartphones filming social-media content also provides her many opportunities for posing, but the format switch takes some time to adjust to.
The first-person perspective on the first two seasons forced Valerie to always be on. Valerie was hyper aware of the cameras on her, and it created much of the show’s comedic tension as she tried to manage each situation and get what she wants without coming off like she wants it. She would manipulate and finesse situations in ways that often made her unlikable but not inhuman. This is really where Kudrow’s performance shines. We could see the calculations running through her head, weighing the tenuousness of her position against her vanity. But the world around her has changed and so has the show.
A charitable reading is that The Comeback is building on what came before, providing a bridge from the season-two sendoff’s single-camera conclusion to this final-season premiere. When her publicist-turned-manager Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) drops in with a housewarming gift, the camera swirls around her apartment, giving us the lay of the land in a way we’ve never been privy. We see Valerie and Mark’s elaborate surveillance setup, which primes us for how King will reestablish that style, before Billy provides a link to the prologue. Valerie’s been offered a new show from her old network, which after a failed pivot to streaming is now called NuNet. The clincher: Billy knows nothing about it because the show is being written by AI. (So there are no asshole writers this time.)
After consulting her Alexa, Valerie stands with her WGA brethren, whom she stood in the heat with at least once, and turns down the offer. After all, she’s working tomorrow and needs to learn her lines. Unfortunately, even in our age of AI, human errors still plague us. A crease in Valerie’s script led her to believe she was appearing in a period piece set “in the ’80s,” when it’s actually a no-budget indie set in a nursing home where everyone is “in their eighties.” This might be Valerie’s lowest moment since she hired her own crew of film school students to do a Comeback without Jane. Arriving with her own wardrobe, Valerie discovers she’s a run-of-the-mill dayplayer who’s forced to do her own hair and makeup. What is this world coming to? Luckily, she runs into Tommy (Tony and Drama Desk-winning theater director Jack O’Brien), the other half of the “two reds” Valerie obviously doesn’t remember. Tommy filled in for Mickey on I’m It when Mickey was on vacation, but Valerie’s just happy that someone can do her hair. Yet it’s all for naught. After the cameras start rolling, one of the residents has a heart attack that isn’t a bit, and, for the second time in one episode, Valerie quits a job, which feels like the least Valerie Cherish thing about this outing. That said, maybe she retained some measure of self-respect after walking out of the Emmys. After all, she briefly showed something resembling a principle by turning down the AI job. By episode’s end, she’s reneged on that, too.
“Valerie Gets A New Chapter” seems at odds with itself. It’s certainly reflective of the fractured media landscape that actors, in particular, are having a hard time navigating. Valerie hosts a podcast. She’s open to collabs. She’s doing no-budget indies. She was Mrs. Hatt! Even Mark is on a reality show, apparently. But without Jane to document the action, we’re missing a key perspective to The Comeback’s humor. The world is moving too fast, and Valerie is struggling to keep up. The show is, too.
Stray observations
- • R.I.P. Robert Michael Morris, our beloved Mickey, who died in 2017.
- • I can’t believe Valerie doesn’t have the head-nodding precision to play Roxie.
- • Was 2023 the last year people took getting COVID seriously?
- • I, for one, am shocked that Patience hasn’t seen The Goodbye Girl. What’s wrong with 23 year olds today? Neil Simon ain’t good enough for you?
- • Valerie’s love of Nivea really comes out in her openness to collabs and willingness to please her husband.
- • “Where have I been, right? Did two seasons of Mrs. Hatt. Was Mrs. Hatt!” “Nobody saw that.” “Well, ’cause it was on Epix, okay? How many apps can one person have, you know?”
- • The interplay between the typical shot-reverse-shot structure and the cuts to the phone screen were really inspired, especially with Kudrow’s plays to the camera and the framing making it look like her arms were protruding from the phone. (“People need a laugh. Now more than ever.”) This format had a lot of juice. I hope we return to it.
- • Any On Cinema fans catch G. Amato as the overenthusiastic nursing home exercise-class participant?
- • Hello, hello, hello. Matt Schimkowitz here, and I couldn’t be more excited to be recapping The Comeback for you. I adore The Comeback and can’t imagine a better person to follow around a cratering Hollywood than Valerie Cherish. Though I think the show is still sharp and Kudrow is still inspired, I’m a little iffy about the format change but am hoping for the best. I’m not watching ahead, so I’ll see how this plays out with all of you.
Matt Schimkowitz is a staff writer at The A.V. Club.
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