Season 3, Episode 4: ‘Valerie Does It All’
No one gets angry quite like Valerie Cherish. One of Lisa Kudrow’s keenest insights into her character — which has paid off repeatedly since “The Comeback” Season 1 — is that Valerie likes to think of herself as a team player, willing to make the best of bad situations. She lives in fear of being tagged as “difficult.”
So when she does get mad, the anger tends to erupt uncontrollably, surprising her as much as it does us. These are some of her realest moments as a reality TV star. But because she hates the way this rawness make her look, Valerie nearly always pivots quickly to damage control … usually while throwing in a “darlin’” or a “doll” to the person she’s mad at.
Valerie is low-boil upset for much of this week’s episode, but she doesn’t really get steamed until the end, while trying to get Billy to take his job seriously. She needs him to be the face and voice of her complaints about the “How’s That?!” writers. But when Billy instead just records her list of beefs and sends it to NuNet as a voice memo, Valerie starts to lose it.
She immediately catches herself, but then Billy pushes her again. Valerie adopts an air of forced calm, saying: “You really let me down today. You’re not being a good producing partner.” Somehow, that even tone is more upsetting than if she had screamed her head off.
Every episode of “The Comeback” is a showcase for Kudrow’s talents, but this week’s “Valerie Does It All” is a particular standout because of the way it shows Valerie repeatedly starting to crack and then making a yeoman effort to pull herself back together. Maybe Valerie keeps pulling back because Jane’s cameras are watching. Or maybe decades in Hollywood have trained her to bite her tongue.
What’s especially painful — yet riveting — about this week’s near-breakdown is that Valerie starts the episode in an optimistic place. In the recap of last week’s episode, I mentioned that even though the A.I.-written “How’s That?!” is formulaic slop, it could possibly be redeemed by the talented human craftspeople who are bringing it to life. When the cast and crew shoot their pilot in front of a live audience, that dream seems plausible. All of the old rituals of making a multicam sitcom — pumping up the crowd, punching up the jokes — are working the way they’re supposed to. The vibes are pretty good.
But Jimmy Burrows quickly bursts Valerie’s bubble when he announces that he won’t be directing any more of “How’s That?!” He found the process of working with A.I. fascinating but not fun. And no matter how game the cast is, he is sure this show will never be great without proper, engaged comedy writers — the “broken” kind who can convert their traumas and insecurities into something unpredictable but relatable.
Then he apologizes to Valerie — not for his departure but rather for the mess she has been stuck with. “This was a really good part for you,” he says with genuine regret. “Could’ve been the one.”
Once Valerie loses Jimmy as her advocate and voice of reason, everything goes south quickly. The script for the second episode of “How’s That?!” is a disaster. It’s way too long, and it tells a nonsensical story that has Valerie’s character Beth in prison alongside an entirely new character. The rest of the cast meanwhile has almost nothing to do. She can’t get Josh or Mary to answer her calls … or Billy, which is one reason she is so mad at him at the end of the episode. (“No one listens to voicemails,” he chuckles as Valerie seethes.)
Finally, Evan (Julian Stern), the Allassist troubleshooter, confirms that there is in fact a problem. It seems Al misinterpreted the prompt for this script and hallucinated a whole scenario in which Beth is jailed with a video game character. Evan apparently doesn’t have the authority to fix this. So who does?
For the harrowing final stretch, Valerie rushes around the Warner Bros. lot in a race against the clock to straighten everything out. But no one will actually hear her. Back at Stage 24, she can’t get the construction crew to stop assembling an expensive jail set. And when Valerie tracks down the Abramses at their on-lot offices, she finds one of their assistants doing TikTok dances. The other is babysitting the kids while Josh works out with a hunky trainer and Mary bangs out a movie script (“Inside-Out 6: Riley Loses Her Virginity”).
So no, Valerie finds no sympathy from her writers. In fact, when she tells Mary about Al’s hallucination, Mary howls with laughter. She ignores the human being in obvious distress right in front of her, refusing bitterly to do any creative work on “How’s That?!” — she isn’t going to help build the A.I. “scaffold” that kills her profession.
But it also seems likely that she just sees Valerie as a representative of Hollywood vapidity. Mary says her main priority is to make enough money from the show to “get me and my kids out of this town before it explodes.” (Note that she does not include Josh in those plans.)
Which brings us back to Angry Valerie. It’s after her infuriating conversation with Mary that she loses her patience with Billy. And who can blame her? One thing “The Comeback” has always been very good at is getting us on Valerie’s side by pitting her against people who are so absorbed in their own drama that they become unfairly dismissive of her very reasonable requests. Her writers should write! Her producing partner should produce!
Kudrow and Michael Patrick King cleverly bookend this episode with scenes that show the disparity between how much Valerie cares about this work and how little her so-called creative partners are doing. We open with Valerie struggling to memorize a tongue-twister speech for the pilot, which requires her to say “bed-and-breakfast” and “Boone and Beth” in quick succession. She repeats the lines, over and over, into the wee hours of the morning, cursing A.I. but determined to get this right.
At the end of the episode we see Billy posing for a Variety “50 over 50” photo shoot, shouting the words “50 Over 50” over and over while Valerie struggles to find her way around the lot in an electric cart.
Valerie is giving her all to pap while Billy is accepting industry honors for doing nothing. Jane is right: Valerie should be yelling way more.
To Be Real
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Julian Stern, who plays Evan? That’s Lisa Kudrow’s son!
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Mark’s slow slide into existential despair seems nearly complete this week. The only companion he can find for Valerie’s pilot taping is their building’s disquietingly temperamental doorman. He tells Valerie, “I hate this new chapter,” but she is too busy to take him seriously. And according to Billy, Mark may be about to be fired from “Finance Dudes,” which does get her attention. (The one thing that makes Valerie madder than being disrespected and ignored is when she hears that people are saying mean things about her husband.)
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Valerie’s embarrassing “Traitors” experience continues to bring her notoriety, whether she likes it or not. Josh’s trainer asks for a video selfie with her and asks her to repeat her viral line from the show. And the “How’s That?!” studio audience whoops loudest when “The Traitors” is mentioned in Valerie’s intro, much to her chagrin. (No mention at all of “Mrs. Hatt,” Valerie grumbles.)
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When one of Josh’s jokes isn’t working, Valerie and Jimmy get Al to come up with another because Josh refuses to pitch in. “On ‘Fetch’ we learned to trust our own voice,” the writer huffs. To which Jimmy quips, “So I guess ‘Fetch’ wasn’t funny.”
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It’s telling — and moving — that when Jimmy describes the types of “broken” comedy writers, he mentions “the funny woman who has been invisible for way too long” and stares at Valerie for an extra half-beat. Jimmy has also been rude at times to Valerie, but to his credit, he does see her.
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