Courtesy of HBO SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Valerie Gets a New Chapter,” the Season 3 premiere of “The Comeback,” now streaming on HBO Max.
“The Comeback,” as created by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, was originally designed to be an ongoing series, a comedy that would go on until HBO or the creators themselves decided it had run its course. Sitcom actress Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) — who was being followed by reality cameras documenting her so-called comeback on a crappy network show called “Room & Bored,” while also capturing every slight and humiliation — would have become just a character on a show.
But that’s not what happened. Instead, the 2005 premiere of “The Comeback” coincided with a rare weak period for HBO, when the network that had birthed “Sex and the City” (which King ran for years) and “The Sopranos” was suffering from an identity crisis. During those fallow years, the powers that be then running the company decided to cancel “The Comeback” after a single 13-episode season.
A funny thing happened, though, in the years after that cancellation. “The Comeback” — which had amassed a small, loving audience during its run, especially as viewers began to see where it was going — ascended to cult-classic status. When HBO decided to revive it in 2014, approaching King and Kudrow to ask whether they had an idea for a second season, bringing back a show was, at that point in time, still a rare thing, and not the commonplace event it is today, as mega-corporations try to suck dry their IP. No, “The Comeback” had been revived by love.
Its eight-episode second season tells the story about how Valerie learns that her “Room & Bored” nemesis Paulie G. (Lance Barber) has created “Seeing Red,” a dark dramedy for HBO in which, in his heroin-addled mind, he was tormented by the star of his sitcom, a red-haired woman named Mallory Church. Storming into HBO to try to kill the show, Valerie ends up with the role of Mallory. Even though Valerie’s husband, Mark (Damian Young), questions why she would ever get into business with Paulie again, and her former “Comeback” producer Jane (Laura Silverman) — who also knows the dangers of Paulie, and wants to chronicle Valerie doing “Seeing Red” for a documentary — Valerie does end up winning an Emmy for her performance.
She’s not there to accept it, though: Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), Valerie’s hairdresser and constant companion, has been hospitalized, and in a shock to Mark and even to herself, Valerie ditches the Emmys ceremony to be by his side. Her Emmys departure also served as a formal rupture for “The Comeback,” as Valerie is seen for the first time on screen as herself, not through the punishing cameras of the reality series or Jane’s documentary.
Courtesy of HBO More than 11 years later, the third and final season of “The Comeback” is upon us, and the world around Valerie has changed. The season premiere opens in summer 2023, during the writers strike, on the eve of the actors strike, as Valerie is attempting to be the latest entry in the procession of Roxie Harts stunt-cast into “Chicago” on Broadway. She’s being documented by her social media assistant, Patience (Ella Stiller), with a reluctant Jane also in tow. (Mickey is no longer by Valerie’s side: Morris died in 2017, having filmed the show’s second season with Stage 4 melanoma.) After a three-year time jump, Valerie is confounded by a dilemma when her manager, Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) offers her forbidden fruit: The lead role in the first sitcom ever to be written entirely by AI.
In an interview last week with Kudrow and King in King’s office on the Warner Bros. lot, the creative partners discuss bringing the show back for a third, and they insist, last time. As opposed to previous seasons, the two of them wrote all of the episodes (with King directing all of them), and beginning the process in November 2024, when they’d meet in person to hash it all out. They call Season 3 the completion of a trilogy, and even if “The Comeback” was originally designed as a yearly series, they’ve embraced what it’s become: a “weird gift,” as King puts it, that materializes when there’s been a “seismic shift.”
“It’s been an event,” Kudrow says. “So I don’t know how to make another event in a year.”
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