When Lisa Kudrow returns to TV as Valerie Cherish, it is a happy event for viewers. It’s also a good time for Hollywood professionals to check their emergency funds. HBO’s showbiz satire “The Comeback” has a way of showing up, like a comet that portends woe, at moments of industrywide upheaval, angst and cataclysm.
In 2005 the first season sent up the rise of reality TV as Valerie, a onetime sitcom ingénue, was trailed by a camera crew making docutainment of her return as the fusty aunt in a sex-fueled youth comedy. Season 2, in 2014, found Valerie playing a version of herself in an HBO showbiz dramedy based on the making of her previous sitcom (the meta runs deep here), as the emergence of streaming and the glut of prestige TV disrupted the industry again.
Kudrow, who created the series with Michael Patrick King, made Valerie a character for the ages, simultaneously broad and complex, delusional but deceptively savvy. Now she’s back, summoned by the bat signal of Hollywood’s latest epochal threat, artificial intelligence.
The bleakly funny result, premiering on Sunday, is the series’s most pointed yet, as it shifts focus from Valerie’s insecurities to the insecurity of the entire creative class. The first two seasons established that Valerie is a survivor. The third (and purportedly last) wonders if the rest of her business will be so lucky.
The season opens in 2023 as Valerie, on hiatus because of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, is taking a stab at Broadway as Roxie Hart in “Chicago.” Returning to Los Angeles, she runs into the union president and fellow sitcom vet Fran Drescher, who warns, “A.I. is coming for all of us.”
Cut to the present, and A.I. has arrived. Valerie, after doing two seasons of the streaming procedural “Mrs. Hatt” (she played a sleuth who wore a hat), is offered the lead and executive-producer role on a multicamera network sitcom. The catch: It’s written by “Al,” a generative A.I. program whose existence the network is keeping under wraps. (The show, “How’s That?!,” is basically an algorithm-slop version of “Newhart.”)
Egos, lies, derivative ideas — on one level, it’s the same old Hollywood story as in earlier seasons. But this time there’s the deathly feeling that it might be the last chapter. “This is not the normal TV evolution, network to cable, cable to streaming,” a veteran TV writer (Bradley Whitford) tells Valerie. “It’s an extinction event.”
The season is also different because Valerie is different. Season 2 ended with her winning an Emmy for her HBO role. She has money, influence and acclaim. Yes, TV stardom has changed: You’ve got to hustle, host a podcast, go on “The Traitors” and “Hot Ones,” stay on top of your socials. (She’s now trailed by a fragile Gen Z social-media assistant, played by Ella Stiller.) But this isn’t the desperate Valerie of the past.
It’s everyone else who’s desperate now. Jane (Laura Silverman), the documentarian who followed Valerie for two seasons, is bagging groceries at Trader Joe’s. Billy (Dan Bucatinsky), Valerie’s manager, is in a career crisis and sees producing “How’s That?!” as his escape. Her old writing and casting cronies are unemployed. Her husband, Mark (Damian Young), has lost his real-life desk job and taken a faux one on a reality show (“Finance Dudes”), and he hates it.
Where the first two seasons were about how Hollywood uses up young actresses and disdains them as they age, the new one makes Valerie an example of the glass cliff: She is a woman who has obtained something resembling real power just as her business is collapsing. (Being the first to star in and produce an A.I. comedy, Mark tells her, “is like saying, ‘I was the first one to eat an arm in the Donner Party.’”)
The network head (Andrew Scott) assures her that professional writers will oversee Al’s work. But the showrunners, Josh and Mary (John Early and Abbi Jacobson), are a bitter, checked-out duo who see the computer-generated writing on the wall and are plotting their exit from the TV business.
This leaves Valerie to hold the production together. She brings in the acclaimed TV director James Burrows (playing himself), who agrees to shoot the pilot out of grim curiosity. And she flails to keep the network’s secret from the cast members, who are mystified by the rewrites arriving from a scribe who “works remotely.” A scene needs a new kicker, and in moments Al spews out dozens of hacky alternatives, like the haywire conveyor belt in “I Love Lucy.”
None of Al’s jokes are great, but — in one of the season’s most depressingly dead-on observations — they might be just familiar and competent enough to get a laugh out of a studio audience. (I fed Google Gemini a description of a scene that Al rewrote on the show, and it indeed came up with a version of the same joke that “How’s That?!” ended up using.)
Kudrow’s performance remains as hilarious and layered as ever. Valerie might superficially seem deluded, but Kudrow shows the constant effort it requires to see only what she can afford to see. Valerie used to look past insults and microaggressions; now she is selectively viewing the implications of her deal with the machine.
So while the new season doesn’t have quite the emotional depth of Season 2 — which in many ways played like a finale for Valerie’s character arc — it takes some surprising turns. I found myself wondering, Is Valerie Cherish the villain now? She says she isn’t. “The Comeback” also wants to say she isn’t, sometimes in heavy handed scenes emphasizing her decency and good intentions.
The show is very smart, however, at pinpointing how nobody in a situation like the A.I. takeover wants to admit responsibility. Valerie says that she didn’t invent A.I., she’s just living with it. A tech specialist assigned to the production says the same thing, and so does the head of the network. We’re all just li’l guys! The buck stops one floor above us!
And what, after all, can you do? You can decide, like Mary, “I am not helping to build the scaffold that kills my profession.” But someone else who needs to pay the rent will. The season has a sharp and timely sense for how desperate workers can be pressured to serve the engine of their desperation — something that has manifested in real life, as out-of-work lawyers and scientists train A.I. for a fraction of their former pay.
If the first two seasons of “The Comeback” were about individual persistence in a cutthroat business, the third ends up as a satire about the dynamics of resistance and collective action in general. Not everything works: The series misses the heart it got from Valerie’s friendship with her stylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, who died in 2017), and the season’s efforts to replace the dynamic fall short.
But this season ends up doing something devilishly surprising: It makes you feel almost — almost! — nostalgic for the Hollywood it spoofed in the first two. The pettiness, the greed, the degradation were all deplorable. But at least they were human.
Now all that work done by fallible, damaged people might be replaced by a force that is not mean but also not good, because it’s not anything, only a mathematical regurgitation of the humanity fed into it. How do we come back from that?
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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