For two decades and three seasons of The Comeback, we’ve watched sitcom star Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) endure endless humiliations at the hands of the cruel and unfeeling entertainment industry. In the final season, she signs on to star in an AI-written sitcom called How’s That?!, inadvertently blows the whistle on the AI part of it, and enrages everyone in Hollywood for taking a job that puts writers out of work. When Valerie’s confronted by a group of “big three” TV showrunners, she insists she can’t quit the sitcom since it’ll put her crew out of work, then takes a mild stand at a press conference, saying that the show only succeeds because of the creativity of its few junior writers (“Go humans!”). When she tries to convince Brandon Wallick, the tech executive who runs her show played by Andrew Scott, to hire an actual showrunner so the series can be great, he says he’s only looking for it to be “good enough.” If Valerie walks, he’ll replace her with a digitally generated actor, too. Just as Valerie thinks she has no way out, one of those other showrunners, played by Bradley Whitford, offers her a new role: Her strong moral character makes her a great fit for his more elevated series about a former judge who decides to become a chef. The second season of How’s That?! will be filmed with an AI version of Valerie. “All’s well that ends well,” she tells her husband, quoting something she heard Diane say on Cheers.
The circumstances, invented by Kudrow and her Comeback co-creator Michael Patrick King, constitute what King refers to as a “gray happy ending.” Valerie gets to keep working and gets recognition for her work, which is what she’s always wanted, even as Hollywood continues to crumble around her. Valerie can’t stop Brandon, so How’s That?!, entirely digital now, will automatically generate itself to fill a trough of content for people to watch absentmindedly, while her new show, The Judge’s Table, can remain a small niche of creativity and craft — real, human, and in love with puns. The Comeback ends by presenting a compromised, only mildly hopeful vision of the present. That’s on par for a show that has documented different eras in the television apocalypse: The first season, in 2005, took on the rise of reality television; the second, in 2014, the obsession with auteur-driven dramedy. Now, we get a viking funeral for the middle-of-the-road sitcom, or at least for the idea of investing care and budget into work audiences may perceive as fluff.
Two decades after Valerie first embarked on a reality show, she has somehow become the adult in the room. Now surrounded by people as desperate for attention and shameless about putting themselves onscreen as she used to be, Valerie turns out to be more adaptable than she once seemed: She’s managing the development of her show, standing her ground in design meetings, and bargaining with writers and producers about what the work needs. This new window into a multifaceted Valerie builds to a final scene where she insists on her own agency. As Valerie sits down for an interview with her documentarian turned friend Jane (Laura Silverman), who’s been with her since the first shot of her reality series, Jane tells her that she’s proud of her for enduring in “an industry that offered you nothing but humiliation.” The actress disagrees. “I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up,” Valerie insists. She might’ve been mocked and slighted, but she soldiered on. “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time,” Jane says. The creators felt the same, they realized as they filmed the scene. Maybe the audience will, too.
The final moments of the show directly address a lot of the conversation around the series itself. Jane asks Valerie what it’s like to suffer so much humiliation, but Valerie insists she never felt humiliated. How did you develop that scene?
Michael Patrick King: That was the first moment, really. It was the first thought when we got to the writers’ room. How do we do a 360 and show people who Valerie is compared to who they assume she was?
Lisa Kudrow: We kept talking about the full circle between this third season and the first season. Everyone thought the first season was so cringe and felt so bad for her. As an actor, everyone would always say, “That must have been so hard for you to play those scenes.” It wasn’t hard at all! Valerie wasn’t feeling any pain. We started talking about that, and all of a sudden … [in Valerie’s voice] “Never felt humiliated. I think you have to agree to be humiliated. I never signed up.”
MPK: That was the line very early on. And then we were trying to thread that needle through the season to get to the point where the audience would go, “Oh my God.”
It’s an interesting choice of words from Valerie, that you have to “agree” to be humiliated, like it’s almost contractual in her mind. How did you land on it?
LK: It came out.
MPK: It’s a very strong point of view, and it lands as a surprise. She’s not in denial that people are being mean, but she’s not participating in it.
LK: You can decide what’s yours and what isn’t.
MPK: And what a healthy way to be! [Laughs.] That you can just decide.
LK: And she ends up being the healthiest, ultimately. This was the other thing: Since 2005, everyone’s on-camera. Everyone’s curating their own reality show. Everyone is marketing themselves. It was the embarrassing thing about Valerie, that she didn’t have any dignity while she was saying, “I’m making a show with dignity!” And now she’s switched places with everybody else. It’s okay to do that. We’ve adjusted our lens as a society on what’s reasonable.
MPK: All the episodes have been named “Valerie Faces Reality” or “Valerie Chases the Truth” or “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants.” The last episode is just “Valerie Cherish.” It’s our way of saying, “Here’s her story.”
In that moment, you also have the camerawork change from black-and-white to color in a wider aspect ratio. Then we see Valerie reflected in Jane’s camera lens.
LK: That’s Michael, the brilliant director.
MPK: And the brilliant DP Elie Smolkin, who came up with that shot. It’s a real shot, by the way, not an effect. It’s an actual image that was captured in the lens with old-fashioned moviemaking mist. We didn’t cut and paste her in.
LK: And it only would hold for under a minute! That’s how long we’d have to see the two of them together in focus like that, together in the lens.
MPK: The entire last monologue was shot on film, so we only had a couple of reels of it, because we wanted in that moment to go from Old Hollywood to whatever “next Hollywood” is.
Photo: Erin Simkin/HBO
The final shot of Jane and her crew packing up in the big empty soundstage as Valerie walks away is very moving, in the way that this season has been so much about the loss of investment in the craft of filmmaking.
MPK: The show’s about Hollywood and about Valerie walking away from this moment. But the subliminal thing is that it’s just one person putting a camera away. Hollywood used to be and can still be a very handmade item. This show is handmade by Lisa and I, with a lot of amazing technicians and actors. It’s a mental and physical effort that human beings put out. That’s what you’re seeing at the end, a big empty thing that turns into magic when you focus it. And Valerie’s not walking away from everything, she’s walking on to a cooking class for the next show. She keeps going.
LK: Yes, that’s the point. Is she delusional, or is she coping? Maybe it’s coping, and maybe it’s a fine line. She’s a survivor, as in the song that plays at the end of the first episode in 2005. [Destiny’s Child’s “Survivor” plays over the end credits of the first Comeback episode. Valerie later does her own cover of “I Will Survive.”] So much of it is full circle. Some of it is intentional, and so much of it is, Oh my God, look at that!
MPK: And in the text of the epilogue, we wanted to make sure Valerie had a thing that worked for her. In our hypothesis of what the future is, she’s going to be one of the people who works on a show written by a human and is recognized for its quality. And in the next thing, it says there’s a digital cast doing How’s That?! for people who watch as they clean their homes or whatever. When we started season one, the threat of reality TV was going to annihilate narrative television. Since then, we’ve had the whole second golden age of television. So in our happy ending — our gray happy ending — there’s a chance there could be one type of AI TV, the way reality is now, and the other type, where people work with humans, could continue. Also, it’s that she’s recognized. It doesn’t say she wins the Emmy, it says she’s recognized. She’s always just wanted to be seen.
LK: The other win is that she’s working with a showrunner who is an intact, decent, talented human who makes great shows. She gets to be in one of his and have a nice experience.
MPK: And from our writing point of view, he only saw her because she had the integrity to stand up for her show and herself. That gave him the idea that she might have enough gravitas to play a woman who was a judge.
LK: And stood up for the 200 people working on that show who would lose a job if she were the one to kill it.
Over the course of this season, one of the big arcs is Valerie coming to realize that she’s the adult in the room. That she has a level of authority that she has to use.
MPK: I’ve heard from people that were, I guess, thrilled that Valerie was such a grown-up, that she was capable when the spotlight hit her. People seem to like that she had enough skills from her career to keep going as people around her kept losing their minds. This season, Valerie kind of went from a cartoon to a painting. All of a sudden, at the end, not only are we referencing Old Hollywood as it goes from black-and-white to color, but you’re also seeing more sides to her. She’s vibrantly shaded.
LK: And she’s such a nice person! She’s nurturing with all these people, too.
Did you find yourselves surprised, in writing and performing this season?
MPK: After we had come up with Jane saying, “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time,” Lisa, in the room, said, “Well, maybe that’s why you can’t get this doc right. You’ve been telling the wrong story. Now tell the one about Valerie Cherish.” I stopped and put my head on the table. I couldn’t contain my emotion or excitement. Whatever Jane was trying to do, she wasn’t telling Valerie’s story until right after Valerie said that.
LK: Because she always saw Valerie as a witless victim and would have compassion for her in that capacity. But Valerie hasn’t ever been a victim, when you think about it.
MPK: That’s why we would laugh so hard when we were filming that first season.
LK: We wouldn’t laugh at a victim!
MPK: People would turn their television off because they couldn’t handle it. But we thought of her as the Terminator. You just can’t kill her.
Structurally, the first two seasons of this show keep everything within a documentary format, up to the point at the end of the second season where Valerie leaves the Emmys and the cameras behind to be with Mickey in a much harder reality. This season, you go in and out of a documentary format.
MPK: It was a creative impulse to end the second season that way. We never thought about a third season. Life got too big and important, so she left the cameras behind. Once we introduced “real life,” without Valerie looking at a lens, we had to continue it. But we didn’t want to let go of the other perspectives. Then we realized there are cameras everywhere, so if we put enough cameras in the show, people would bounce between the trademark documentary cameras, the security cameras in the condo — that’s the way people are living now, there are cameras in rooms for no reason — and then no cameras. Like when Mark comes home drunk. That was both thrilling and complicated, to give people The Comeback they remember but sneak in real life.
In the second-to-last episode, Valerie runs into Malin Akerman’s Juna, who she thinks is initially chasing her down over the AI sitcom. But Juna wants to thank her for support of her career.
LK: We had a different version of that and, thank God for table reads, we read it and went, “We’re really not saying anything.”
MPK: It was a bit more servicing the AI plot, but the personal journey of those two was very important. We realized there needed to be more of a gift or an emotional reason for Juna to come back. Now someone is telling Valerie who she is at a time when she needs it, after the crew abandons her. Then she walks into the finance dudes going, “Hi, everybody, I’m Valerie Cherish.”
LK: “Welcome to my home!” It makes her have an emotional release.
MPK: Valerie wasn’t an actor who asked to give other people less. She just always asked, “Could I have more?” Valerie’s whole M.O. is that she only thought about herself, and it’s complicated because she welcomed Juna into her home and, yes, there were cameras there, but it was lovely, and what you’d hope somebody would be to you on a show.
LK: It was also important, even from season one, that the women aren’t competitive and horrible to each other, which is a falsehood that keeps getting perpetuated by Hollywood. Any part of this that has anything to do with my experience on Friends is how we all supported each other. That is a possibility for a work situation in Hollywood.
What was it like, among the cast and crew, to talk about the crises in Hollywood that you were depicting on the show?
MPK: We were filming at Warner Bros., at the soundstage where Now, Voyager was filmed, and people were wondering about tomorrow. We don’t know. But we did know that we had a crew that was delighted to be working in Hollywood on a show about Hollywood and going into a lot where they used to work every day. When we filmed a scene with the crew talking about AI, it was personal.
LK: I liked that we had Stephanie Hodge, who plays the first AD Bev, saying, “We don’t know, maybe AI will decide that it can’t do a better job than you do.” We don’t know! But of course they’re going to try, if it’s in fact less expensive, and let’s see, because an audience will always tell you what works and what doesn’t. If we’re saying anything, it’s that it’s going to happen, but it might not work out.
MPK: And it’s always been a mix of truly authentic and manufactured authentic in the world of sitcoms. In some sitcoms, when the jokes don’t land, they’d put a laugh track in. But those aren’t the sitcoms that make a difference to people. There’s something about the ones that are surprising, as Jimmy says, that makes an audience actually gasp-laugh.
LK: And by the way, that’s always a synergy between writing and performance. You don’t get that great when it’s just one of them. It’s an important pairing.
MPK: And you can’t make a performance from bits and pieces of other performances. It’s always the originals that break though.
That’s the message James Burrows gives as himself earlier in the season, when he says you need a writers’ room of real and weird and sometimes broken people to come up with material that’s above the par of what AI might generate.
MPK: We only would’ve written that scene if Jimmy were delivering it, because it had to be a nonwriter, and it had to be someone who understood the sitcom world. It had to come from Jimmy’s actual, grounded, deeply personal, nontheatrical reality. And even in that speech, we talk about how broken writers can be.
LK: Only humans experience those emotions and convert the pain into comedy in order to cope. Writers have been doing that their whole lives. They’ve honed that skill.
MPK: The theme of the season is how to adapt, really. It’s how you adapt that makes a human being survive. Writers that have had terrible childhoods are able to adapt and capitalize on it by putting it in a show and getting paid and buying a house and, you know, living.
Some of that pain Valerie experiences this season is her saying good-bye to Mickey and pouring his ashes over the Warner Bros. lot.
LK: It felt like we were really doing it. I had to remind myself, No, no, those weren’t ashes, those weren’t his remains. Take after take. It wasn’t Robert Michael Morris, actually. But it felt like it was.
MPK: Robert Michael’s death happened off-camera years ago, and it really deterred us from even thinking about The Comeback. How do you do it without Mickey? We had the invaluable essence of Jack O’Brien, whom we brought in because Valerie would think he had a similar quality. And we wanted the audience to think we’re trying to do a similar character, and then have him say early on, “I’m not Mickey,” so people can relax. We’re not trying to replace him. You could never replace him. It gave us a way of handling Mickey’s absence by having Valerie not have handled it until we put her on the roof. And we had to get special dispensation to put a star on a roof.
LK: Oh, we did?
MPK: Yeah, you have to get permission to put a star on a roof at Warner Bros.
Throughout the season, we hear about Mrs. Hatt, Valerie’s mystery series on Epix that nobody watched. She insists it would’ve been a hit if anyone had found it. Finally, we see a glimpse of it!
LK: Michael writes these things in two seconds. He wrote that in, what, an hour?
MPK: I mean, Mrs. Hatt, come on! The whole concept of Mrs. Hatt was so silly and intriguing, and of course Valerie would think there’re so many successful lady-snoop shows on TV but hers just got overlooked.
LK: [In Valerie’s voice] “And we were there first!” [In her own speaking voice] She’s forgetting about Murder, She Wrote.
MPK: We were so glad that we did it because people were starting to say they hoped they could see Mrs. Hatt. And to have Paul Dooley [playing the man Mrs. Hatt accuses of murder] there made it a genuine thing. It is really decadent to believe your world so much that you create Mrs. Hatt.
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