Season 3, Episode 1: ‘Valerie Gets a New Chapter’
Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King pull off a remarkable magic trick whenever they make a season of “The Comeback.”
The character they cocreated, Valerie Cherish (played by Kudrow), should be insufferable. She’s an actress with only one apparent talent: delivering corny punchlines and catchphrases in the kinds of sitcoms that peaked in popularity in the 1990s. She keeps trying to extend her time in the show business spotlight by making TV shows and documentaries about herself, even though the constant presence of cameras in her life threatens her marriage and makes her look vain and shallow.
So why is Valerie still so likable?
The third season of “The Comeback” opens with a sequence that helps answer that question. The story begins in 2023, as the entertainment industry is recovering from the Covid shutdowns and dealing with strikes by the writers’ and actors’ unions. Valerie, always wanting to stay busy, has booked her first Broadway show, stepping into the role of Roxie in “Chicago,” as so many nonmusical actresses have before her. She arrives for dress rehearsals with her designated documentarians: Jane (Laura Silverman), who has been filming her off and on for 20 years now, and Valerie’s new social media specialist, Patience (Ella Stiller).
Valerie is woefully underprepared. She can’t keep up with the musical’s snappy pace, and she keeps delaying rehearsal by talking to the cameras. We should find her exasperating.
But the theater folk are so much worse. The director is all stick, no carrot, when it comes to correcting Valerie’s mistakes. A few of the young performers in the cast openly snicker at her, with a mocking tone. When a frustrated Valerie wonders aloud why the “Chicago” producers called her in the first place, one dancer snaps, “Because they were up to the Vs?”
The point is this: Throughout the previous two “Comeback” seasons and now in the third, Kudrow and King, the head writer and a frequent director, always make it clear that Valerie is, at her core, a good-hearted and enthusiastic person. When we see people being needlessly callous and mean toward her, we want to protect her. She may be a doofus, but she’s our doofus.
In the first season of “The Comeback,” in 2005, we met Valerie at a low career ebb, debasing herself in a minor supporting role in a network sitcom — years after starring in one of TV’s biggest hits — while also agreeing to appear in a reality series about her own life. In Season 2, in 2014, King and Kudrow pushed this premise into meta territory, as Valerie agreed to play a version of herself in an edgy cable series about the making of the sitcom in Season 1. She played a fictional Valerie while also mugging to Jane’s cameras in a documentary about her life, leaving her husband, Mark (Damian Young), wondering if she would ever be her actual self again.
The Season 3 premiere reveals what Valerie has been up to while also setting up what this season is going to be about. The “Chicago” gig, unsurprisingly, collapsed quickly. (Patience got Covid, giving Valerie an excuse to bail.) The story then jumps ahead to 2026. Valerie is about to shoot a small role in an indie film. She also has a podcast now (“Cherish the Time”), and she and Patience pump out pictures and videos for “the socials” around the clock. Even Mark has gotten into the brand-building act, co-starring in a reality TV series called “Finance Dudes.”
For the most part, this premiere feels like just any ordinary episode of “The Comeback,” in which Valerie tries something new that seems exciting but ends in disappointment and embarrassment (comically, of course). After the “Chicago” fiasco at the beginning, the episode ends with the similarly disastrous indie film shoot. Valerie thought she was going to be playing a fitness trainer in the 1980s. Instead, she’s playing someone who leads exercises for 80-year-olds in a nursing home. During her one scene — shot at a real home, with real residents — an old man has an actual heart attack. That’s classic “Comeback.”
Throughout the episode, King and Kudrow (the script’s co-writers) slyly spoof the options available today for a sexagenarian actress who has never really been an A-list celebrity. Valerie did two seasons of an Epix mystery series called “Mrs. Hatt” that nobody watched. She has been promoting Nivea on her socials, just to show that she’s “open to collabs.” For the indie film, she sent in a self-taped audition to get the part. When she arrives on set, she is treated as just another “day player,” expected to bring her own costume and do her own hair. The hustle never ends, even for an Emmy-winner.
All of the above lays the groundwork for the season’s main story line. Valerie’s manager-publicist, Billy (Dan Bucatinsky), is thrilled to tell her that she’s been offered the lead in a new throwback multicamera sitcom on a faltering streaming service called The New Net. The catch? The show will be entirely written by artificial intelligence. Valerie is initially skeptical. (She asks Amazon’s Alexa if there has ever been a TV show written by A.I. before, and Alexa can’t answer. That does not bode well.) But the humiliating indie shoot changes Valerie’s mind.
This is also a big part of who Valerie is: someone whose integrity fluctuates. At first she’s indignant about A.I., insisting to Mark that SAG-AFTRA went on strike over that issue and asking Billy whether an AI-written sitcom is even “allowed.” (Billy, shrugging: “It must be, because they’re doing it.”) But she also says, “I’ll do an A.I. series next year when everyone else is.” And though she claims to be a stalwart unionist, early in this episode we see that she mainly went to one of the protests so that Patience could get a picture of her with Fran Drescher for the ’Gram.
And yet there are still plenty of examples of the likable Valerie in this premiere. We see her better nature when she arrives at the film set and seems upset at first that no production assistant is there to meet her, before deciding that a low-budget production’s “smaller footprint” is better for the environment. Is she trying to make herself look good for Patience’s camera? Absolutely. But she’s also genuinely trying to bring a positive attitude to her work. It’s what she does.
This is how she wins people over. Even when other actors, directors, writers and crew members are being rude, insensitive or vicious to her, she can usually find a friendly face in the crowd. At the nursing home, she runs into Tommy (Jack O’Brien), a resident who remembers her fondly from when he used to do her hair on her first sitcom. Even during the miserable “Chicago” rehearsal, a genial dancer named Stephen (Ahmad Simmons) pipes up to say that she’s very funny in the dialogue scenes.
That’s Valerie’s superpower. When all else fails, she makes people laugh. Sometimes she even does it on purpose.
To be real
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Jane only appears in this episode’s “Chicago” sequence, then isn’t mentioned again when the action moves to 2026. But there’s clearly a story there that will be explored further. Jane makes a cryptic reference to feeling indebted to Valerie, who gave her $25,000 for some as-yet-unspecified personal reason. Stay tuned.
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Another potential subplot to keep an eye on: Mark and Valerie’s financial situation. They have moved from a Brentwood mini-mansion to an apartment, and it is implied that Mark is doing reality TV because he lost his job in finance. In the 2023 scenes, he mentions to Valerie that he was telling raunchy old jokes in the break room with one of his office buddies. Does that have something to do with where he is in 2026?
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An early running gag: Patience’s fragility. Beyond the bout of Covid, she also suffers from migraines, and at the end of the episode we see her with a medical boot on one foot because, “I just stepped on it wrong.” Maybe that’s why Valerie doesn’t seem quite as bossy with Patience as she has always been with Jane. We have yet to see Valerie give Patience one of the brusque timeout signals that she constantly threw at Jane.
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Valerie’s hairdresser and biggest supporter Mickey is no longer around because Robert Michael Morris, the actor who played him, died. We do see a picture of him on the mirror in her “Chicago” dressing room, next to a picture of Valerie’s fellow redhead, Lucille Ball. Valerie can be very silly, but she does really care about her craft and about the people in her life. That too is part of this series’s wonderful alchemy.
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