Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Chris Revelle | TV | April 29, 2026
The Comeback's third season has its hands full. The HBO series brings the wonderful mess called Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow, always fantastic) back to our screens during a particularly dismal entertainment era. AI is writing the smooth-brained sitcom Valerie stars in, reality TV has turned Valerie's husband, Mark (Damian Young), into a raging narcissist, and what's worse, Valerie's dear, sweet Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) is no longer with us to take the edge off. The series is still sharp and funny, but the tone is more somber than it used to be. That is, until Valerie takes in an episode of her cozy mystery series, Mrs. Hatt. The clouds parted, heavenly light spilled out, and I knew I was a member of the Hatt Hive. Consider this my formal petition to make Mrs. Hatt a real show and then give it every conceivable Emmy.
The episode Valerie watches is framed as the one of the Epix series' best, and I absolutely believe it. Mrs. Hatt (Cherish [Kudrow]) is a gardener in New England who just wants to tend to her gorgeous dahlias and wear a variety of wide-brimmed hats, but has a real knack for stumbling into murder investigations. With the help of her retired police chief husband, Mrs. Hatt uses her landscaping knowledge to bust cases wide open. In the clip shown in episode 6 ("Valerie's Home Alone"), Mrs. Hatt notices something strange is going on with the neighbors' flowering shrubs. She approaches Charlie (Paul Dooley), a neighbor with suspiciously low-growing hydrangeas and an even more suspiciously missing wife. Mrs. Hatt suspects the flowers have been replanted recently. "Which makes me question, what's buried underneath there?" The way Kudrow-as-Cherish delivers the spot-on act-break line, "Where is Nelly?" sent shivers up my spine.
"Valerie's Home Alone," has other concerns as an episode, but as I watched, my mind kept returning to Mrs. Hatt. It's not just that the series references cozy mystery classics like Murder, She Wrote that obsesses me, it's also that it's such a finely calibrated and specific joke. There's shades of Jessica Fletcher, but Mrs. Hatt also gestures at the soft thrillers and light mysteries that used to populate the USA network, where characters were welcome. The Lucy Lawless series My Life is Murder also came to mind, what with Mrs. Hatt always pulled away from her retirement activity to solve murders. Narrow, hyper-specific references like these are catnip to me.
It's such a long-shot dream that it will certainly not come true, but I'm putting it out into the ether anyway: give us a full season of Mrs. Hatt. It can be a 12 episode thing, but I'd really prefer the old-school network 22-episode order. Lisa Kudrow would crush the assignment of playing Valerie Cherish playing Mrs. Hatt. Her friends and allies in town could be played by whatever delightful character actors have time. Think of the possibilities! A full Mrs. Hatt series could do for cozy mysteries what Angie Tribeca did for detective shows or what NTSF:SD:SUV did for federal agent procedurals. I'm far from the only person on this cursed internet clamoring for more Mrs. Hatt. Maybe if we all make the same wish together, it could come true.
