It’s pretty clear why the third and final season of HBO Max’s “The Comeback” has flown under the radar, despite the show’s previous Emmy nominations. When a TV series takes decade-long breaks — Season 1 premiered in 2005, Season 2 in 2014 — viewers tend to forget it exists.
But the strange history of “The Comeback” also gives it a stealth advantage. In 2005, you might have dismissed it as just another cringe comedy about Hollywood’s vapidity. After all, it stars a beloved bygone sitcom actress (Lisa Kudrow of “Friends,” who cocreated the series with longtime “Sex and the City” writer Michael Patrick King) as a beloved bygone sitcom actress figuring out her next act. But when we binge all three seasons today, we rediscover “The Comeback” as a time capsule and a surprisingly poignant chronicle of the 21st century so far, for better and worse.
The deal
In the late ’80s, Valerie Cherish (Kudrow) starred on a popular sitcom called “I’m It!” — and in her own mind, she still is. In 2005, desperate to claw her way back into the industry, Valerie takes a role on a bad sitcom that comes with a fringe benefit: her own reality series, “The Comeback.” Producer Jane (Laura Silverman) documents Valerie’s ongoing humiliation by young showrunner Paulie G. (Lance Barber), who sees her as a washed-up harridan.
In 2014, with the reality TV boom in full swing, Valerie pleads with a disillusioned Jane to follow her around with cameras again. Jane agrees after Valerie scores a role playing herself in Paulie G.’s dark HBO comedy that revisits their on-set conflict.
The third season kicks off during the 2023 labor disputes that cast a grim light on the specter of artificial intelligence in Hollywood. Three years after Valerie walks the picket line (mainly for the photo op), a streamer offers her the chance she’s been waiting for: a starring role in an old-school sitcom with a live audience. There’s just one catch, her new boss (Andrew Scott) notes nonchalantly: “How’s That?!” in which Valerie plays a lovable sixtysomething innkeeper, is conceived and written by AI.
Will you like it?
When “The Comeback” premiered, reality TV was a novelty. Today, everyone’s a bit tired of it. Accordingly, while the show’s first two seasons were largely framed as Jane’s raw footage, Season 3 slips into a more relaxed single-camera-sitcom style. While Jane still pops in with her camera and acerbic remarks, Valerie’s now more focused on podcasting with the help of her sullen Gen Z social media manager (Ella Stiller). The new format helps the final season home in on its theme: the downfall of writers.
To grasp what a seismic shift this is in the entertainment industry, watch Season 1 — in which Paulie G. wields enormous power over his cast and writers’ room — and Season 2, in which the golden age of prestige TV grants him new artistic freedom. In Season 3, a chastened, middle-aged Paulie G. begs Valerie for a job. When the writers hired to be her sitcom’s human figureheads quit in disgust, Scott’s character replaces them with a kid (Tony Macht) whose only skill is prompting an AI program known as “Al.”
It’s a watershed moment for Valerie, a character who gets more interesting the longer we know her. Always snappily dressed, she prides herself on pivoting to stay relevant, fueled by a try-hard’s bottomless thirst for attention. Yet her brassy diction, her prized fluffy mane and her cultural touchstones betray her age — and so does her deep-rooted reverence for writers. Despite having clashed with every one of her human showrunners, she can’t stomach their replacement.
In one touching scene, the late veteran sitcom director James Burrows (playing himself) tells Valerie why he won’t work on her AI show: Comedy comes from misfits turning their “pain into jokes,” he declares. Who wants a machine’s smooth facsimile of human awkwardness?
Perhaps the viewers of “How’s That?!” — because the show becomes a hit. Or maybe they just love Valerie herself, who’s been out of style long enough to be in style again.
In its long goodbye, “The Comeback” walks a fine line between cynicism and sentiment — with, as always, some detours into slapstick. The relationship between Valerie and her adoring husband (Damian Young) is as sweet and silly as ever. Robert Michael Morris, who played Valerie’s witty hairdresser and emotional support person, died in 2017, but the show gives his character a meaningful send-off in which Valerie stops joking away her grief.
Longtime viewers will feel some of that grief as the show concludes, bookending nearly a quarter century of show-biz history. The brave new world of AI entertainment may await, but some of us would rather linger with these characters who are all too human.
If you like this, try…
“Episodes” (five seasons, 2011-2017; rentable): Matt LeBlanc, Kudrow’s costar on “Friends,” did a meta turn of his own in this Golden Globe Award-winning sitcom in which he plays himself adapting a British comedy show for Hollywood.
“The Studio” (one season, 2025; Apple TV): Seth Rogen (a memorable guest star on “The Comeback”) plays a flailing studio head who just wants to make good movies in this wicked satire.
“Enlightened” (two seasons, 2011-2012; HBO Max): Another HBO Max cringe comedy that never got the audience it deserved is this Mike White (“The White Lotus”) creation in which Laura Dern plays a self-centered Californian who returns from recovery determined to be an “agent of change.”
This article appears in June 24 • 2026.
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