COMEBACK TO THE FUTURE
2005 for the first season, 2014 for the second, 2026 for the third: a little like a comet, Valerie Cherish reappears in the sky about every ten years to light up the small screen and comment on the hilariously dismal state of the show business. After skewering reality TV, sitcoms, and even HBO in a tasty self-parody, Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow push the ultimate horizon of farce : the AI delirium. It would be, in Hollywood as elsewhere, the future, the obvious, the providence.
The proof: Valerie Cherish is hired by NuNet, an amped-up streaming platform, to become the star of yet another sitcom that would be unremarkable if not for the absence of… writers, since everything is generated by an AI and run by a bungling crew. It took at least that much to coax this cousin of Michael Scott from The Office back out into the light and back on the pursuit of love and glory, especially after the stunning ending of season 2.
So we almost pick up with basically the same cast and almost the same setup in the third season of The Comeback. This is, in fact, the least successful aspect of this new chapter, which sometimes strains to pull back Jane, Paulie G, James Burrows, or Juna, and thus attempt to recreate the magical bubble around Valerie Cherish. Fortunately, they do not stop there, far from it.
ÇA VA COUPER CHERISH
Time feels a little less about comedy, even within the merry circus of The Comeback where almost everything ends well. If Valerie Cherish took nearly two seasons to truly push back against the people around her without sprinting to apologize right after, she shows more teeth here, and the world returns the favor. Whether up against a slightly irritating wardrobe stylist or an somewhat incompetent manager, or in the face of screens throwing back a flood of hate when things go wrong, there’s something a shade heavier, as if Valerie Cherish’s ironclad smile could finally crack.
Meanwhile, in twenty years of existence, The Comeback carries with it a reality that sometimes exceeds fiction, and not simply because AI is real now, or because Jane Fonda pops by, for a moment, in her own role. The winks are sometimes light, as with references to Friends especially when Valerie confronts Phoebe’s ghost, during a magical shot on a wall plaque. Or when she finds herself in a writers’ strike alongside Fran Drescher, former president of the actors’ union who has become the face of that battle in 2023.
And the mirror effect can be brutal. Actor Robert Michael Morris passed away in 2017, the man who played the outrageously blunt Mickey, who is afflicted with cancer in season 2. The absence of the hairdresser and longtime ally of the heroine isn’t brushed aside and season 3 gives him a touching place, less in the grandiose scattering of ashes than in a simple mirror reflection, for a moment of modest tears. And a final exchange between Valerie and Paulie G, which tenderly closes their utterly chaotic relationship that gave season 2 its spice, once again underscores the talent of Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, beyond the jokes.
This back-and-forth helps cloak, to an extent, the problem with the mockumentary format, which has lost some of its sense this time around. Here too, season 2 delivered a striking pivot in the last episode where the camera became nothing more than a pure work of fiction, as Valerie left this circus to find herself and her loved ones. Season 3 nudges us back toward an earlier approach and juggles multiple perspectives without quite knowing what to do with the on-camera presence clinging to Valerie, which turn out to be as useful as the social media manager Patience—just as memorable as Tyler in season 2.
IA T-IL UN PILOTE DANS L’AVION ?
Aside from a few parentheses more (the shoot for a tiny indie film in a retirement home) or less (the Chicago sketch) amusing, the first part of season 3 stays on track. Naïveté, narcissism, or cowardice (or all three at once) again pushes Valerie into a pickle and makes her complicit in a nasty joke that will inevitably blow up in her face. In trying to appease everyone, she shoots herself in the foot, and the resulting comedic effect is now well established.
But as the season goes on, The Comeback regains some of its swagger, and it’s mainly thanks to how it treats AI. When the cover is blown on All(Assist), who pays the price? First, Valerie, the perfect punching bag in the eyes of her colleagues, the entire industry and the public, because she’s the only one who tried to bring humanity back into the equation to try to fix her mistake.
Then Evan, the poor technician in charge of running the AI on set who becomes the team’s enemy, even though he’s the one person who actually wrote for the show. Meanwhile, NuNet’s boss uses his shadowed position, unaffected by the petty scapegoating on the public stage.
Valerie is obviously not spotless in this story, and that was precisely the point of season 3: not placing her in a comfortable external position, but watching her fling herself into the mouth of the wolf, with a sometimes hilarious bad faith (the GPS ending in episode 2). But almost everyone bears some responsibility in this mess, including the crew who chose to ignore the countless obvious anomalies, as Juna points out.
All these people are ultimately cogs in a big machine that uses and abuses them, and the leakage storyline demonstrates it well: while Valerie bashes herself trying to own the chaos, a NuNet henchman reveals that they deliberately leaked the information to orchestrate a promo stunt.
There were a thousand ways to mishandle AI, whether through cowardice or convenience, especially in a comedy. The Comeback manages to come out of it with its head held high by showing how this revolution rests on a lot of wind and cynicism, with a distribution of roles that suits the powerful. In the end, it’s simply the latest fashionable face of a well-oiled system, where even the puppeteers insist responsibility lies elsewhere (“Everyone wants me to be the villain! I didn’t invent this technology!”).
PLEIN LE KUDROW
Once again, the season finale of The Comeback may be the end, period. The conclusion of season 2 was nearly perfect, Valerie having won the big prize by earning the respect of her loved ones and an Emmy. Season 3 rests on the same machinery of double victory, with self-respect (she stops swallowing insults and shuts NuNet’s door) and others (she lands a prestigious lead role in a series, and moves toward another Emmy).
But once again, The Comeback proves cleverer. Valerie has traded a few feathers for a piece of her soul, having naively given NuNet the right to exploit her AI double to continue the show “without her.” She thought only the writers were endangered, but the wave is already coming for the actors. And when the epilogue shows that How’s That?! continues its run with an all-AI cast, the joke lands with a sour note.
The Comeback may end with Valerie finally getting her rightful joy, but the triumph masks a painful defeat. The actress literally doubles herself to keep existing, straddling a past that is really the present and the flawed future they’re selling. If she sometimes resigns, she won’t stop fighting on the other side. And that may be a perfectly logical ending for a heroine who is so contradictory, ultra-narcissistic yet incredibly generous, who longs for a career but won’t sacrifice her marriage, and who will ultimately be shockingly easy to love, despite all the reasons to hate her.
That miracle owes much to Lisa Kudrow, who co-created this golden role and proved how absolutely stellar an actress she is. If The Comeback truly ends here, it will be satisfying. But if they want to return in ten years, by all means, don’t hesitate.
P.S. A quick note, a few scenes in this season 3 are very, very funny: the AI hallucinating and weaving Nathan Drake from Uncharted into a sitcom script; Valerie’s running gag about not knowing what to say in her podcasts; Billy arranging a therapy session with his own camera crew, and a cinematographer prone to tripping; Valerie addressing a camera that isn’t hers; Valerie noting that no one listens to actors “except during elections.”
The entire third season of The Comeback is available on HBO Max.
