Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lindsay Traves | TV | March 26, 2026
It’s been a decade since Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) skipped her Emmys speech in favor of visiting her beloved Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), a decision that saved her from the lonely life of a career-focused actress. Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King built the original The Comeback series around an out-of-time sitcom actress trying to find her place in the new era. In 2005, when it started, that meant making a reality show, so the story found its comedy in watching Valerie self-curate via faux raw footage of the chronicles of her climb to stardom. Returning a decade later, Val, whose career was forever changed by the reality show’s portrayal of her as a desperate actress, returned to the fray to self-produce a documentary about her reapproaching acting and taking a role as an unflattering character based on herself.
The meta-series so brilliantly looked directly into its own industry and took it to task. Valerie is a yutz, and all she wanted was an Emmy, even if that meant compromising herself to portray a villainous version of the woman she was a decade earlier. Paulie G (Lance Barber), who was an otherwise throwaway villain in the first series, playing the mean-spirited antagonizing showrunner, is later reintroduced as a recovering addict who’s failed his way to having a high-budget HBO series. Val would have been the butt of his joke, but instead chooses to participate in it to get a version of what she wants.
The second season’s finale is so gorgeous and tragic and brilliant and moving that it’s nearly impossible to imagine following that act, but in the years since it aired, there have been such colossal changes in the industry. Where Valerie was once up against reality television and the garbage treatment of women, she’s now living in the complex world of being a multihyphenate (you gotta have a podcast), social media, artificial intelligence, streaming mergers and rebrands, and multiple industry strikes. Valerie might be portrayed as a bit of a joke, but she never truly is. The fact has always remained that she is a hungry professional willing to take on whatever challenge the industry throws at her, even these ones.
For this new season, which premiered Sunday, Valerie has traded in the documentary cameras for an iPhone. Gone is the raw footage of the first two seasons (at least so far) in favor of the glossy multicamera approach previously only seen in the second season finale. It’s a bit jarring for a show that got so much of its comedy from the format and having eyes on the struggling director trying to capture Val’s behavior, and it also loses the sharpness of watching Valerie self-curate the footage (even if she is sometimes speaking directly to her coordinator’s iPhone). There’s a meta joke embedded about Val’s surprise that multicamera sitcoms are back when she’s offered one by her now agent, Billy (Dan Bucatinsky), a whiny version of the volatile publicist we once knew.
So far, it’s unclear who is desperate in this third outing for Valerie. Is it Billy, Mark (Damian Young), who seems to have abandoned his work in favor of his own reality series, or is it still Val and the relics around her?
The Comeback is easily the most biting satire about the Hollywood television machine, and I’m thrilled to see what it does when plopping the hardworking and well-meaning awkward actress into the modern calamity. Its opening episode was a bit of a thud, with turning up some of the intensity on the jokes and pivoting to a multi-cam approach that doesn’t seem to allow for it, but the show has earned enough good faith to keep fans seeing what will happen next. The brilliant Kudrow still has the high-strung mannerisms of the faux actress, and even if it’s just some prayer hands and catch phrases, it might all be enough, even if it’s not as quickly iconic.
The Comeback premiered Sunday and will drop week to week thereafter
