{"id":664291,"date":"2026-05-11T17:31:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:31:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/664291\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T17:31:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T17:31:09","slug":"the-comeback-series-finale-completes-a-bittersweet-cynical-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/664291\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Comeback’ Series Finale Completes a Bittersweet, Cynical Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThis column contains spoilers for the May 10 series finale of The Comeback<\/a>, though is The Comeback really the sort of plot-rich show that you worry about having spoiled for you?<\/p>\n

\n\tA good finale \u2014 a good planned finale, at least \u2014 is the destination of a journey measured in years, in seasons, in episodes.<\/p>\n

\n\tHBO\u2019s The Comeback is a uniquely modern show insofar as Sunday\u2019s finale was the culmination of nearly 21 years since the series\u2019 June 5, 2005, launch. Or maybe it was the culmination of three seasons \u2014 pretty reasonable by today\u2019s premium cable standards, but hardly epic. Or perhaps it was the culmination of 29 episodes of television, roughly the number that The Comeback star Lisa Kudrow<\/a>\u2018s Friends would produce in its typical season, plus a month.<\/p>\n

\n\tI mention this because when I watched the series finale of The Comeback back in March, having binged eight screeners in a weekend, it felt like Kudrow<\/a> and co-creator Michael Patrick King<\/a> had leaned too much into the \u201cfinale\u201d aspect, aiming for a level of conclusiveness that felt needlessly tidy at best or generally unearned at worst. I accepted that maybe I\u2019ve never been the biggest fan of The Comeback \u2014 it\u2019s a show I liked, but never loved in the way its most passionate supporters have \u2014 and so perhaps the seemingly overly happy and resolved ending just wasn\u2019t for me.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s still true, but I rewatched the episode and it struck me in a different way \u2014 a way that forced me to reflect on time and the show\u2019s bizarre relationship to it, as well as the happy ending and how \u201chappy\u201d it actually was.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a common joke \u2014 one that has become more common since the election of 2016 and especially since the COVID pandemic \u2014 that in our chaotic modern world, every day feels like a week, every week like a month, every month like a year. But sometimes it feels like a blink. We\u2019re bingeing life. This is even truer in an entertainment business that has been in exhausting flux \u2014 the toll of the pandemic, of industry-wide strikes, of unprecedented media consolidation.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe third season of The Comeback has aired over only two months, but the season\u2019s core adversarial relationship, between the grasping desperation of the creative community and the steady encroachment of AI, has only taken on an increasingly dominant role in Hollywood\u2019s ongoing conversations. (For more on those conversations, read THR\u2018s AI issue<\/a>, including my own column<\/a> on how television has been approaching AI both onscreen and behind the scenes.)<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the Comeback finale, Kudrow\u2019s Valerie Cherish is summoned to meet with the so-called Mt. Rushmore of television writers, scribes played by Bradley Whitford<\/a>, Adam Scott<\/a> and Justin Theroux<\/a>. The three writers urge Valerie to use the upcoming renewal press conference for NuNet\u2019s largely AI-written How\u2019s That?! \u2014 a show whose success is measured in a 72-percent completion rate, rather than quality \u2014 to make a plea on behalf of their profession.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis is not the normal TV evolution \u2014 network to cable, cable to streaming, streaming to AI. It\u2019s not,\u201d Whitford\u2019s Jack Stevens says. \u201cThis is an extinction event.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Comeback, going back to its origins, hasn\u2019t been a show that produced a great volume of content, but it has traced, over 21 years, an unimaginable evolution in the medium, one that has been both normal and abnormal. We have, indeed, gone from network to cable, cable to streaming, and, on the horizon, AI looms. Cable looked like an extinction event for broadcast. Streaming looked like an extinction event for cable.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut television survives. Scripted television survives, despite the fears that helped spawn The Comeback in the first place \u2014 that reality television was going to squeeze scripted programming off of the airwaves.<\/p>\n

\n\t(The airwaves, kids, were what television used to materialize through, a magical force that was replaced by cable lines and bandwidth and finally just \u201cthe ether.\u201d Look, I watch the technology. I don\u2019t understand it.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThe final season of The Comeback aired over months, but it might as well have aired over years. The series run of The Comeback aired over decades, but it might as well have aired over centuries. Twenty-one years. Three seasons. Twenty-nine episodes. They\u2019re eons in TV time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Comeback has always been a very cynical show, but when it comes to the idea that AI is going to be the extinction event for creativity as we know it, the final season wasn\u2019t quite optimistic, but it was definitely pragmatic. Or at least it put on a happy face.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe season\u2019s harshest critique wasn\u2019t directed at nerds in Silicon Valley writing programs that develop \u201ccreativity\u201d through theft, nor at the billionaires fronting those endeavors, uninterested in the impact on the environment or the widest swath of the workforce. That\u2019s what AMC\u2019s The Audacity<\/a> is trying to do. That\u2019s what Hacks<\/a> tried to do this very week in \u201cQuik Scribbl,\u201d an episode I thought was shockingly inept, a series of superficially dogmatic observations that somebody forgot to sprinkle with punchlines.<\/p>\n

\n\tNo, The Comeback pointed its most sneering contempt at Andrew Scott\u2019s marvelously squirmy Brandon Wallick, a studio executive who insists, in the finale, that he only wants AI to replace the writers on sitcoms, not prestige dramas that require actual geniuses, like the Mt. Rushmore writers. AI can have sitcoms, right?<\/p>\n

\n\tBrandon, who comes across like an amalgamation of a dozen top-level execs I\u2019ve spoken to over the past 25 years, isn\u2019t evil. He\u2019s just bent on self-preservation. \u201cMy job is to move television forward,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\n\tValerie responds by evoking Pastor Martin Niem\u00f6ller, somebody she definitely has never heard of. She says: \u201cGood luck keeping your job. I\u2019m glad I at least said something. Cuz it\u2019s like that thing, that saying, you know. When they came for the writers, you said, \u2018OK.\u2019 When they came for the actors, you said, \u2018Sure!\u2019 And when they come for you, there won\u2019t be anybody left to say, \u2018OK, sure.’\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSounds bleak, right?<\/p>\n

\n\tBut that wasn\u2019t really the tone of the finale. Valerie\u2019s AI-written sitcom may be puerile garbage, but we see in the episode that it\u2019s still capable of building an on-set family of actors and craftspeople, still capable of inspiring at least one assistant to move in the direction of becoming a writer himself, still capable of delighting a human studio audience. And when Stevens comes to the set, there\u2019s still enough magic for him to remember his own experiences as a baby scribe on multicam sitcoms.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe magic still remains, even if people like Brandon are trying to kill it.<\/p>\n

\n\tIs it a little smug and self-satisfied of Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow to have Valerie declare, \u201cYou can tell the press all you want that sitcoms are easy and that they don\u2019t need genius, and that they\u2019re not important, you know? But they have been culture-defining when they\u2019re great, right?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tSure, but that doesn\u2019t mean it isn\u2019t true.<\/p>\n

\n\tValerie, having found her backbone, is ultimately replaced on her sitcom by an AI version of Valerie, which sounds cynical \u2014 except that Valerie ends up getting a presumably far better job as the star of Stevens\u2019 new series, Judge\u2019s Table, about a judge who leaves the law to become a chef.<\/p>\n

\n\tYes, The Comeback put on a happy face, for Valerie\u2019s sake. And Valerie, the show and documentarian Jane (Laura Silverman) assured us, has grown over the 21 years. Definitely the Valerie who stood up to Brandon isn\u2019t the Jane we met in the pilot. She\u2019s a confident Emmy winner now, however fragile that Emmy statue, and presumably her latest comeback, may be.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo the end of The Comeback felt almost bizarrely upbeat, especially knowing that Valerie is going to be okay anyway, since the journey of the show brought her closer to husband Mark (Damian Young) and Mark is making plenty of money for the both of them.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe show ends by telling us Valerie picked up another Emmy nomination and that the rest of the cast of How\u2019s That?! (less successful actors, presumably without their own Marks) were replaced by their AI equivalent, but that, per the final text on the screen, no AI was used in the writing of The Comeback.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo that\u2019s a happy ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s a sad ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s a conclusive ending.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd I guess that even if it was only 29 episodes, The Comeback aired and kept coming back during such a tumultuous moment that it earned its finale and its finality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This column contains spoilers for the May 10 series finale of The Comeback, though is The Comeback really…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":664292,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[5487,64,63,320859,134,188175,111932,34332,205158,427],"class_list":["post-664291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-adam-scott","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-bradley-whitford","tag-entertainment","tag-justin-theroux","tag-lisa-kudrow","tag-michael-patrick-king","tag-the-comeback","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=664291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/664291\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/664292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=664291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=664291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=664291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}