It’s hard to remember now, given its 20-year status as an enduring cult classic, but after its first season, Lisa Kudrow’s series The Comeback was chalked up as yet another post-Friends flop.

The series premiered in June 2005, barely a year after Friends went off the air, and was part of an early noughties slew of short-lived TV projects by members of the cast – Matt LeBlanc’s spin-off Joey, Matthew Perry’s Studio 60 at the Sunset Strip, Courteney Cox’s Dirt – trying to carve out a post-Friends TV career but not finding anything that stuck.

The Comeback had the briefest run of them all: One 13-episode season, met with decidedly mixed reviews before being quietly cancelled.

Then something unusual happened. The show – a high-concept mockumentary following washed-up TV actress Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) as reality TV cameras follow her latest attempt at a career comeback – gained a real following in the years after its cancellation. Kudrow’s hilariously layered performance as woman hoping to find reality TV fame while keeping her dignity (an impossible task) rewarded repeat viewings.

To say that first season was ahead of its time was an understatement: A rich, glamorous but underemployed LA housewife, keen to debase herself on camera for just one more taste at fame? Incredibly, this was a year before the Real Housewives franchise even premiered (and watch Paula Abdul’s 2007 car crash of a reality show Hey Paula to see just how prescient The Comeback really was – it could serve as a long-lost extra season).

Almost a decade later, the groundswell of support for the show – by then retrospectively considered a comedy classic – had grown so much that HBO finally picked up a second season. During that 2014 return, Valerie scored some much-needed career wins – earning an Emmy after a star turn on a dark dramedy series – but they came at the expense of her personal life, as her obsession with fame threatened to swallow her whole.

And now, 12 years on, The Comeback returns for a third (and, Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King insist, final) season.

This time, Valerie’s back on-air in her favourite format, a crowd-pleasing sitcom, but with one key difference: It’s the first show to be written by AI. Many actors would baulk at the concept; Val’s just happy to be working.

Speaking at an LA press conference last week before the new season premieres today, Kudrow described The Comeback as “the best thing” she’s ever done and said she was thrilled to return to the role of Valerie Cherish more than 20 years after the show debuted.

“Just as reality TV felt like an almost extinction event, at the time, for scripted television, it’s the same feeling now about AI,” she said.

She said it had been a particular joy to revisit her favourite character roughly every decade or so. This time around, we find Valerie with “slightly more confidence, but still the desperation, because she hasn’t worked. So you know, she’s been adrift for a few years when we meet her again … which is right where we want her,” Kudrow laughs.

Part of the fun of The Comeback – and the genius of its once a decade release schedule – is seeing how Valerie has tried to stay relevant amid the changing tides of Hollywood.

In season two she had a disastrous try-out to be one of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills; her pathological conflict avoidance made her the worst possible candidate for the job.

This time around, she has an equally ill-fated attempt to be stunt cast into the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago.

And like seemingly every other Hollywood actor, she has her own podcast, where she struggles to fill the dead air talking about what she watched on TV last night.

This season ups the celeb ante too: Jane Fonda and Andrew Scott pop up for hilarious cameos, while John Early and Abbi Jacobson are great as the exhausted, permanently enraged co-writers of Val’s AI sitcom, just trying to cash one last paycheque before Hollywood implodes.

Of course, Valerie doesn’t share their pessimism about the state of the industry. Despite the many obstacles in her way, she never gives up – and once again, Kudrow proves Cherish is her greatest comic creation.

Val got her Emmy win last season – let’s hope with season three, Kudrow earns another Emmy of her own to mark The Comeback’s swansong.

The first episode of The Comeback season 3 streams on HBO Max from today.