‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Valerie Has a Secret’
For most of the first two seasons of “The Comeback,” the show held fast to a documentary style, with lots of jittery hand-held shots and characters speaking directly into the camera. But did you notice something different about the Season 3 premiere?
After the opening Broadway sequence — and after Valerie’s resident documentarian, Jane, scurried back to Los Angeles — the rest of the episode looked like any other prestige cable comedy. Aside from some shots from security cameras and Patience’s phone, the overall look last week was very un-“Comeback.”
That change carries over to this week … at least at first. The director and co-writer Michael Patrick King has some fun with framing in the episode’s first half, showing how reality can be abstracted by technology in our modern world.
In the opening scene, Valerie arrives for a meeting at NuNet — the network producing her new sitcom, “How’s That?!” — and we get a fantastic shot where Patience’s cellphone fills the center of frame, blocking Valerie’s face so we can see her only via the phone’s camera. And then inside NuNet, Valerie gets stuck on a Zoom conference call with dozens of the network’s employees, each waving at her silently from little boxes on a big screen. The real world keeps looking more and more distant and blocked off.
And in each of these moments, Valerie seems bewildered. For about 20 years, off and on, she has had Jane and her camera crew hovering whenever she has made a big new career move. Something feels off-kilter.
That all changes when Jane returns. Valerie finds her ex-employee by chance, working as a checkout clerk at a Trader Joe’s near Valerie’s new apartment. In the years since fleeing New York, Jane has fallen on hard times: deeply in debt, unable to get anyone to back her heavily political documentaries, and forced off her ranch by the wildfires. (“Our whole canyon burned because we didn’t pay off the right fire department,” she complains to Valerie, whose Brentwood home survived unscathed.)
As soon as Valerie talks Jane into following her around again, “The Comeback” looks like its old self, with Valerie preening and pontificating for Jane’s shaky cameras.
And Jane isn’t the only “Comeback” returnee. At a restaurant, Valerie runs into Sharon (Marla Garlin), the casting director for the network sitcom “Room and Bored” (featured in Season 1) and the edgy dramedy “Seeing Red” (from Season 2). Sharon is eating dinner with her walking buddy, Jane Fonda, who eyes Valerie suspiciously, probably because she has no idea who Valerie is — or perhaps because she does.
Regardless, Sharon is anxious to work on “How’s That?!,” and Valerie is happy to hire her, if only for selfish reasons. In the past, Sharon didn’t always take her seriously. Now Valerie has the power.
That new dynamic carries over to the “How’s That?!” production. This time, Valerie doesn’t have to deal with a dismissive and abusive head writer like Paulie G. Instead she’s working with Josh Abrams (John Early) and his wife and writing partner, Mary (Abbi Jacobson), who are the writers of record for this mostly A.I.-generated series.
The Abramses are clearly skeptical about the project. (When Josh confesses to peppering the A.I. script with his own jokes, Mary sarcastically mutters, “Great, keep teaching it.”) But they seem genuinely glad to have Valerie on board. After all, as Josh explains, the couple made their previous show, “Fetch,” about four ladies who hang out together at a dog park, for “women of a certain age.”
The title of this week’s episode is “Valerie Has a Secret,” which refers to the A.I. assistant for “How’s That?!,” Allassist, nicknamed Al. Allassist came up with the show’s premise — which has Valerie playing Beth, running a B&B with her hunky nephew, Bo — and it suggested Valerie for the lead.
Jane can see the logic behind all this. “That’s really what people want, right? Nothing challenging.” The veteran TV director James Burrows (playing himself, as he did in the first two “Comeback” seasons) concurs. “It’s ‘Newhart’ meets ‘Fawlty Towers’ but with a woman,” he says to Valerie. “You’ll be great.”
But neither Jane nor James is interested in “How’s That?!” until Valerie tells them that it’s being written by A.I. — which is something the NuNet executives expressly asked her not to share. Brandon Wallick (Andrew Scott), the main man in charge of the Allassist project, quickly ends a Zoom conference call when Valerie mentions her initial misgivings about A.I. Brandon insists — with some suspicious hedging — that they’re compliant with the Writers Guild’s agreement about the use of A.I. But he also knows that people in Hollywood can get squirrelly when they hear the words “artificial intelligence.”
As for Valerie, she doesn’t fully understand why people are so worked up about A.I., either positively or negatively. She just sees a wave she thinks she knows how to ride — much in the same way that she figured she would be good at being a social media influencer, given all of her experience in reality television.
In that NuNet meeting at the start of the episode, Valerie looked flustered by all the young people on the conference room screen, with names like Arbor and Egypt. But when the head of marketing and sales, Ridley Macintosh (Merle Dandridge), described NuNet’s innovative plan “to mitigate the cost of content with breaks in the program to advertise product,” Valerie nodded. Those are commercials. That’s just like network TV. That’s a world she knows.
For Valerie, for now, what matters is that the algorithm has decided the kind of work she does has value again. The robots have singled her out. In Valerie’s mind, she is finally getting the respect in Hollywood she deserves — if only from the machines.
It’s telling though that the episode ends with her repeatedly ignoring the chirpy computer voice on the GPS device in her car. (“Last time I didn’t listen to it and I saved five minutes,” she tells Jane’s camera.) The machines may love her, but they still need to know who’s the boss.
To be real
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Remember Mark’s reality TV project, mentioned last week? Well it turns out that “Finance Dudes” is not a real series yet. It’s just a proposal. Also, it appears Mark did indeed lose his job for telling inappropriate jokes. So things aren’t going great for Valerie’s husband. At the same restaurant where Valerie sees Sharon, Mark runs into his former boss, Greg, and tries to flee without finishing his dessert. Greg ends up stopping him just as the waiter is bringing the chocolate cake in a to-go bag. (“Greg looks at me like I can’t afford to waste food,” Mark moans.)
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I hope that before this season ends, we’ll get to see some actual footage from Valerie’s unwatched Epix series “Mrs. Hatt.” But at least this week we do get to enjoy a brief clip of her on “The Traitors.” She was sent home in the second episode after accidentally revealing she was a traitor. Her immediate reaction — “It’s so stressful” — went viral. During the NuNet meeting, one of the employees holds his phone up to the camera to show the meme, so that in the frame we get a screen within a screen with a screen. Pretty clever, Michael Patrick King.
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There’s a scene late in this episode in which Valerie has to leave Jane behind again to talk to the camera-averse James Burrows, during which the show shifts back to “normal” mode, stylistically: smooth camera moves and static shots, no hand-held. But a few minutes later, after getting Burrows to say yes to “How’s That?!,” Valerie is seen through Jane’s equipment again. It just feels right.
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