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For two decades and three seasons of The Comeback<\/a>, we\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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\u2019s confronted by a group of \u201cbig three\u201d TV showrunners, she insists she can\u2019t quit the sitcom since it\u2019ll 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 (\u201cGo humans!\u201d). 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\u2019s only looking for it to be \u201cgood enough.\u201d If Valerie walks, he\u2019ll 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\u2019s That?! will be filmed with an AI version of Valerie. \u201cAll\u2019s well that ends well,\u201d she tells her husband, quoting something she heard Diane say on Cheers.<\/p>\n The circumstances, invented by Kudrow and her Comeback co-creator Michael Patrick King, constitute what King refers to as a \u201cgray happy ending.\u201d Valerie gets to keep working and gets recognition for her work, which is what she\u2019s always wanted, even as Hollywood continues to crumble around her. Valerie can\u2019t stop Brandon, so How\u2019s 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\u2019s Table, can remain a small niche of creativity and craft \u2014 real, human, and in love with puns. The Comeback ends by presenting a compromised<\/a>, only mildly hopeful vision of the present. That\u2019s on par for a show that has documented different eras in the television apocalypse<\/a>: 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s been with her since the first shot of her reality series, Jane tells her that she\u2019s proud of her for enduring in \u201can industry that offered you nothing but humiliation.\u201d The actress disagrees. \u201cI think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up,\u201d Valerie insists. She might\u2019ve been mocked and slighted, but she soldiered on. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m seeing you for the first time,\u201d Jane says. The creators felt the same, they realized as they filmed the scene. Maybe the audience will, too.<\/p>\n The final moments of the show directly address a lot of the conversation around the series itself. Jane asks Valerie what it\u2019s like to suffer so much humiliation, but Valerie insists she never felt humiliated. How did you develop that scene?\u00a0 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, \u201cThat must have been so hard for you to play those scenes.\u201d It wasn\u2019t hard at all! Valerie wasn\u2019t feeling any pain. We started talking about that, and all of a sudden \u2026 [in Valerie\u2019s voice] \u201cNever felt humiliated. I think you have to agree to be humiliated. I never signed up.\u201d<\/p>\n 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, \u201cOh my God.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s an interesting choice of words from Valerie, that you have to \u201cagree\u201d to be humiliated, like it\u2019s almost contractual in her mind. How did you land on it? MPK: It\u2019s a very strong point of view, and it lands as a surprise. She\u2019s not in denial that people are being mean, but she\u2019s not participating in it.<\/p>\n LK: You can decide what\u2019s yours and what isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n MPK: And what a healthy way to be! [Laughs.] That you can just decide.<\/p>\n LK: And she ends up being the healthiest, ultimately. This was the other thing: Since 2005, everyone\u2019s on-camera. Everyone\u2019s curating their own reality show. Everyone is marketing themselves. It was the embarrassing thing about Valerie, that she didn\u2019t have any dignity while she was saying, \u201cI\u2019m making a show with dignity!\u201d And now\u00a0she\u2019s switched places with everybody else. It\u2019s okay to do that. We\u2019ve adjusted our lens as a society on what\u2019s reasonable.<\/p>\n MPK: All the episodes have been named \u201cValerie Faces Reality<\/a>\u201d or \u201cValerie Chases the Truth<\/a>\u201d or \u201cValerie Gets What She Really Wants<\/a>.\u201d The last episode is just \u201cValerie Cherish.\u201d It\u2019s our way of saying, \u201cHere\u2019s her story.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s camera lens. MPK: And the brilliant DP Elie Smolkin, who came up with that shot. It\u2019s a real shot, by the way, not an effect. It\u2019s an actual image that was captured in the lens with old-fashioned moviemaking mist. We didn\u2019t cut and paste her in.<\/p>\n LK: And it only would hold for under a minute! That\u2019s how long we\u2019d have to see the two of them together in focus like that, together in the lens.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cnext Hollywood\u201d is.<\/p>\n Photo: Erin Simkin\/HBO\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 LK: Yes, that\u2019s the point. Is she delusional, or is she coping? Maybe it\u2019s coping, and maybe it\u2019s a fine line. She\u2019s a survivor, as in the song that plays at the end of the first episode in 2005. [Destiny\u2019s Child\u2019s \u201cSurvivor\u201d plays over the end credits of the first Comeback episode. Valerie later does her own cover of \u201cI Will Survive.\u201d<\/a>] So much of it is full circle. Some of it is intentional, and so much of it is, Oh my God, look at that! <\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s a digital cast doing How\u2019s 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\u2019ve had the whole second golden age of television. So in our happy ending \u2014 our gray happy ending \u2014 there\u2019s 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\u2019s that she\u2019s recognized. It doesn\u2019t say she wins the Emmy, it says she\u2019s recognized. She\u2019s always just wanted to be seen.<\/p>\n LK: The other win is that she\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Over the course of this season, one of the big arcs is Valerie coming to realize that she\u2019s the adult in the room. That she has a level of authority that she has to use. LK: And she\u2019s such a nice person! She\u2019s nurturing with all these people, too.<\/p>\n Did you find yourselves surprised, in writing and performing this season? LK: Because she always saw Valerie as a witless victim and would have compassion for her in that capacity. But Valerie hasn\u2019t ever been a victim, when you think about it.<\/p>\n MPK: That\u2019s why we would laugh so hard when we were filming that first season.<\/p>\n LK: We wouldn\u2019t laugh at a victim!<\/p>\n MPK: People would turn their television off because they couldn\u2019t handle it. But we thought of her as the Terminator. You just can\u2019t kill her.<\/p>\n 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. In the second-to-last episode<\/a>, Valerie runs into Malin Akerman\u2019s Juna, who she thinks is initially chasing her down over the AI sitcom. But Juna wants to thank her for support of her career. 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, \u201cHi, everybody, I\u2019m Valerie Cherish.\u201d<\/p>\n LK: \u201cWelcome to my home!\u201d It makes her have an emotional release.<\/p>\n MPK: Valerie wasn\u2019t an actor who asked to give other people less. She just always asked, \u201cCould I have more?\u201d Valerie\u2019s whole M.O. is that she only thought about herself, and it\u2019s complicated because she welcomed Juna into her home and, yes, there were cameras there, but it was lovely, and what you\u2019d hope somebody would be to you on a show.<\/p>\n LK: It was also important, even from season one, that the women aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n What was it like, among the cast and crew, to talk about the crises in Hollywood that you were depicting on the show? LK: I liked that we had Stephanie Hodge, who plays the first AD Bev, saying, \u201cWe don\u2019t know, maybe AI will decide that it can\u2019t do a better job than you do.\u201d We don\u2019t know! But of course they\u2019re going to try, if it\u2019s in fact less expensive, and let\u2019s see, because an audience will always tell you what works and what doesn\u2019t. If we\u2019re saying anything, it\u2019s that it\u2019s going to happen, but it might not work out.<\/p>\n MPK: And it\u2019s always been a mix of truly authentic and manufactured authentic in the world of sitcoms. In some sitcoms, when the jokes don\u2019t land, they\u2019d put a laugh track in. But those aren\u2019t the sitcoms that make a difference to people. There\u2019s something about the ones that are surprising, as Jimmy says, that makes an audience actually gasp-laugh.<\/p>\n LK: And by the way, that\u2019s always a synergy between writing and performance. You don\u2019t get that great when it\u2019s just one of them. It\u2019s an important pairing.<\/p>\n MPK: And you can\u2019t make a performance from bits and pieces of other performances. It\u2019s always the originals that break though.<\/p>\n That\u2019s the message James Burrows gives as himself<\/a> earlier in the season, when he says you need a writers\u2019 room of real and weird and sometimes broken people to come up with material that\u2019s above the par of what AI might generate. 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\u2019ve honed that skill.<\/p>\n MPK: The theme of the season is how to adapt, really. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Some of that pain Valerie experiences this season is her saying good-bye to Mickey and pouring his ashes over the Warner Bros. lot. MPK: Robert Michael\u2019s 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\u2019Brien<\/a>, whom we brought in because Valerie would think he had a similar quality. And we wanted the audience to think we\u2019re trying to do a similar character, and then have him say early on, \u201cI\u2019m not Mickey,\u201d so people can relax. We\u2019re not trying to replace him. You could never replace him. It gave us a way of handling Mickey\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n LK: Oh, we did?<\/p>\n MPK: Yeah, you have to get permission to put a star on a roof at Warner Bros.<\/p>\n Throughout the season, we hear about Mrs. Hatt<\/a>, Valerie\u2019s mystery series on Epix that nobody watched. She insists it would\u2019ve been a hit if anyone had found it. Finally, we see a glimpse of it<\/a>! 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\u2019re so many successful lady-snoop shows on TV but hers just got overlooked.<\/p>\n LK: [In Valerie\u2019s voice] \u201cAnd we were there first!\u201d [In her own speaking voice] She\u2019s forgetting about Murder, She Wrote.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For two decades and three seasons of The Comeback, we\u2019ve watched sitcom star Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) endure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":442152,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,28153,4302,85,1037,46,32252,40120,3929,118151,411,4578,4579],"class_list":["post-442151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-exit-interview","tag-hbo","tag-il","tag-interview","tag-israel","tag-lisa-kudrow","tag-michael-patrick-king","tag-qa","tag-the-comeback","tag-tv","tag-vulture-homepage-lede","tag-vulture-section-lede"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442151\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/442152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Michael Patrick King: That was the first moment, really. It was the first thought when we got to the writers\u2019 room. How do we do a 360 and show people who Valerie is compared to who they assume she was?<\/p>\n
LK: It came out.<\/p>\n
LK: That\u2019s Michael, the brilliant director.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/c994921f5efcd38b180a93babbcc8c4ea7-laura-silverman-lisa-kudrow.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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MPK: The show\u2019s about Hollywood and about Valerie walking away from this moment. But the subliminal thing is that it\u2019s 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\u2019s a mental and physical effort that human beings put out. That\u2019s what you\u2019re seeing at the end, a big empty thing that turns into magic when you focus it. And Valerie\u2019s not walking away from everything, she\u2019s walking on to a cooking class for the next show. She keeps going.<\/p>\n
MPK: I\u2019ve 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\u2019re also seeing more sides to her. She\u2019s vibrantly shaded.<\/p>\n
MPK: After we had come up with Jane saying, \u201cI feel like I\u2019m seeing you for the first time,\u201d Lisa, in the room, said, \u201cWell, maybe that\u2019s why you can\u2019t get this doc right. You\u2019ve been telling the wrong story. Now tell the one about Valerie Cherish.\u201d I stopped and put my head on the table. I couldn\u2019t contain my emotion or excitement. Whatever Jane was trying to do, she wasn\u2019t telling Valerie\u2019s story until right after Valerie said that.<\/p>\n
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 \u201creal life,\u201d without Valerie looking at a lens, we had to continue it. But we didn\u2019t 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 \u2014 that\u2019s the way people are living now, there are cameras in rooms for no reason \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
LK: We had a different version of that and, thank God for table reads, we read it and went, \u201cWe\u2019re really not saying anything.\u201d<\/p>\n
MPK: We were filming at Warner Bros., at the soundstage where Now, Voyager was filmed, and people were wondering about tomorrow. We don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
MPK: We only would\u2019ve 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\u2019s actual, grounded, deeply personal, nontheatrical reality. And even in that speech, we talk about how broken writers can be.<\/p>\n
LK: It felt like we were really doing it. I had to remind myself, No, no, those weren\u2019t ashes, those weren\u2019t his remains. Take after take. It wasn\u2019t Robert Michael Morris, actually. But it felt like it was.<\/p>\n
LK: Michael writes these things in two seconds. He wrote that in, what, an hour?<\/p>\n