“The Comeback” is everywhere now. Once a pop cultural Cassandra doomed to swift cancellation after a single season on HBO in 2005, the brainchild of comic actor Lisa Kudrow and veteran TV writer Michael Patrick King (“Sex and the City”) has an influence, or perhaps predictive power, that grows more apparent with every passing year. The mockumentary centered on aging sitcom star Valerie Cherish’s attempted return to the spotlight presaged the format’s ubiquity in American comedy, from the American version of “The Office” to more recent applications like “The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.” Valerie’s desperation and “The Comeback”’s biting cynicism can be found in subsequent showbiz satires like “BoJack Horseman” — in which Kudrow voiced one of the title character’s love interests — and “The Other Two.” And of course, the rise of social media means that all of us are essentially starring in our own versions of “The Comeback”: DIY reality shows that promise to exchange personal disclosure for a slim chance at fame.
This ubiquity is now present even within “The Comeback” itself. In the third and final season of the series, which arrives nearly 12 years after its belated second season aired in 2014, Valerie’s not the only one with a camera crew in tow. Her straitlaced husband, Mark (Damian Young), has been fired from his longtime job and joined the cast of a series called “Finance Guys” to fill his days. Valerie’s publicist-turned-manager Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) starts to chafe at suppressing his ego in service of his clients, then commissions his own self-produced project to correct the imbalance. As the eight episode season broadens its scope from Valerie’s career to the larger, sorry state of Hollywood in 2026, the message becomes clear: in this dire situation, everyone is now Valerie Cherish, with all the self-abasement that entails. And Valerie herself starts to look increasingly like the adult in the room.
With the conclusion of “The Comeback,” Kudrow and King have delivered a swan song not just for a character who dates back to Kudrow’s time at Los Angeles comedy troupe The Groundlings, but for the industry where they — and Valerie — have forged their careers. The sincerity of this aim can sometimes run counter to the sharp, excruciatingly realistic satire that’s previously been the show’s bailiwick, and sometimes still is. Facts on the ground are exaggerated to channel forward-facing anxieties about artificial intelligence; Valerie gets a hero’s journey and a happy ending that runs slightly counter to the bleak picture “The Comeback” otherwise paints. In light of such hiccups, it’s best to view Season 3 as a victory lap “The Comeback” has more than earned the right to make. And Kudrow, who co-writes the show with King, remains a master of her craft until the very last frame, imbuing every forced smile and stammered “you know” with a hilarious, heart-tugging need for validation. It’s only right Valerie Cherish gets the chance to exist in a world that’s caught up to her, then leave on her own terms.
Season 3 opens in 2023, with actors and writers on strike and Valerie taking an ill-suited role as Roxie Hart on Broadway to pass the time. (She quits before previews, preferring the smiling fakery of Hollywood to the catty theater types who don’t bother to couch their criticisms.) “The Comeback” then flashes forward to a seemingly alternate present where neither guild won significant protections against AI’s incursion, because Valerie’s latest role is the lead of “How’s That?,” a multi-cam sitcom with a secret: it’s mostly written by a chatbot, with a couple human creators (John Early and Abbi Jacobson, two of many younger disciples playing tribute to Valerie via bit part) deployed as a reluctant front.
Unlike “Room and Bored,” the schlocky show-within-a-show from Season 1 that cruelly shunted Valerie into the sexless role of Aunt Sassy, or “Seeing Red,” the fictional HBO dramedy from Season 2 that won Valerie an Emmy for playing a thinly veiled version of herself in yet another layer of meta self-reference, “How’s That?” is more speculative than firmly rooted in the TV trends of today. (Though if we learn Netflix has a secret partnership with OpenAI, I’ll regretfully eat crow, and likely move to Antarctica.) AI may be resurrecting Val Kilmer, but it isn’t running shows under a WGA contract — yet, forcing “The Comeback” to go bigger and broader than its previous wheelhouse of ultra-specificity. Though flashes of that sensibility thankfully remain: 2026 Valerie has a podcast, as any microcelebrity must, and competed on “The Traitors,” another nod to reality’s post-Season 1 flowering like her abortive stint on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
This unmooring from the original mission of closely studied spoof, both of scripted fare and the reality boom “The Comeback” debuted in the earliest stages of, gets a visual echo. Much of Season 3 abandons the show’s signature framing device to use non-diegetic footage — that is, scenes shot not by canonical, in-the-room producers on shaky handheld cameras, but by the invisible all-seeing eye through which we see all non-mockumentary shows. “The Comeback” technically introduced this possibility in the closing scene of Season 2, when Valerie visits her ailing hairdresser Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, then terminally ill in real life) in the hospital. (Both Mickey and Morris get a Season 3 tribute that’s objectively lovely.) But the effect then was a dramatic, intentional break from form that situated us in Valerie’s mindset. Here, it’s haphazardly and often confusingly deployed, sometimes toggling between modes mid-scene. As on King’s other HBO revival project “And Just Like That,” there’s also something off about seeing Valerie in glossy high-def. She belongs in shaky, frenetic motion, just as Carrie Bradshaw belongs in soft, pre-4K glow.
On the other hand, there’s something fitting about “The Comeback” struggling to adjust to the times, just as Valerie — along with all her peers — is. The modern equivalent to documentarian Jane’s (Laura Silverman) camera is, of course, the smartphone. While “The Comeback” experiments with first-person perspectives of Valerie’s social media assistant Patience (Ella Stiller, daughter of Ben) recording her boss on an iPhone, it wouldn’t be very pleasant to watch an entire season that way. (Valerie refers to Patience’s purview as “S and M,” one of her many malapropisms.) Incorporating more non-diegetic scenes also allows “The Comeback” to go more places with fewer plot contortions.
Those places include a chance encounter at the restaurant at Soho House with casting director Sharon (Marla Garlin), who despite having dinner with Jane Fonda herself is so desperate for work she practically begs Valerie for an opportunity. As an executive producer on “How’s That?,” Valerie has actual power now — a diminished kind she must share with a machine, but power nonetheless. It’s a rich vein for “The Comeback” to mine, even and especially when, in a pleasant surprise, Valerie wields her position responsibly: managing staff conflicts with minimal prodding, giving pep talks, and advocating for her cast and crew to the cold-blooded, AI-boosting head of the network (Andrew Scott, in his most villainous role since Moriarty). Now that all of show business has sunk to Valerie’s level of scrounging for scraps, there’s no one better qualified to rally the troops.
By the end of Season 3, “The Comeback” starts singing Valerie’s praises so explicitly, using various characters as a mouthpiece, that it risks undercutting its own message. Just as Kudrow excels when underplaying Valerie’s all-consuming neuroses, “The Comeback” excels when showing how good its heroine can be when given the opportunity, not telling us. And for much of Season 3, the series does just that. In the end, you can’t blame Kudrow and King for wanting to send their creation off into the sunset, even after it’s demonstrated just how unlikely such an upbeat conclusion to Valerie’s arc would be. “The Comeback” may look like a reality show, but at heart, it’s a Hollywood fantasy that knows it’s an endangered species. How’s that?
“The Comeback” Season 3 premieres March 22 on HBO and HBO Max at 10:30 pm ET, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
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