The Comeback Season-Premiere Recap: The Old Razzle-Dazzle

The Comeback
Valerie Gets a New Chapter
Season 3 Episode 1
Editor’s Rating ★★★★
Previous Next
Previous Episode
Next Episode

TV series get praised as “ahead of their time” for any number of reasons, but few can wear that badge as proudly as The Comeback. The first season, which ran on HBO over 20 years ago (God help us all), predicted the rise of reality television and the key role that celebrities would play within the genre with faded sitcom star Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) filming a new multi-cam series and a reality show simultaneously. The pilot includes a cameo from Facts of Life and Living Single star Kim Fields, who dismissively notes, “I’ll do another sitcom, but who is so desperate for a comeback that they actually want cameras to follow them around all day?” Ten years later, Fields would join the cast of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Valerie was a pioneer! The Comeback’s second season, which aired in 2014, skewered prestige TV as Val played a fictionalized version of herself on the gritty HBO dramedy Seeing Red, ultimately winning an Emmy for her troubles. And though she discovered she wasn’t cut out for The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, she still insisted on being followed by Jane Benson (Laura Silverman) and her cameras.

It’s too soon to say exactly what story season three of The Comeback — debuting a painfully long 12 years after the last — wants to tell, but given the way the premiere addresses AI anxiety and the overwhelming dominance of streaming, the show appears to still have its finger on the pulse of the entertainment industry. We first catch up with Val in 2023, when she’s poised to make her Roxie Hart debut in Chicago on Broadway. Naturally, she’s being filmed, both by Ella Stiller’s Patience (“My social media”) and Jane, the latter of whom does not want to be there but feels “indentured,” thanks to a $25,000 gift from Val at some point in their past. “No, you’re paying me back by the work you’re doing,” Valerie counters. “Yeah, that’s what indentured means,” Jane answers. It’s a pleasure to be with these characters again and to find them in a familiar relationship context. At the same time, I did feel a twinge of concern when Jane acknowledged that the whole thing felt like the documentary they made ten years prior. Too much of the same thing could hold the season back — we always want The Comeback to be ahead of the curve by giving us something fresh.

Thankfully, Val in a Broadway musical is brand-new terrain. She’s predictably disastrous at rehearsal when she can’t quite get the lip-sync timing right for “We Both Reached for the Gun.” “Question, is this the Real Housewives version?” she asks. “Yes, this is the dumbed-down version,” the director (played by Robbie Fairchild, Broadway star and Munkustrap in the Cats movie) fires back. Watching Valerie get torn down by everyone around her is never fun, but we watch The Comeback to see her somehow persevere. And to her credit, she’s at a point in her life when she’s no longer pretending not to be miserable for the sake of getting through it. “This is hell,” she says to husband, Mark (Damian Young), on a FaceTime call in her dressing room. “Now I’m wondering, Maybe I should have seen the show before I said ‘yes.’” I also appreciate that she’s still holding on to the self-awareness she attained in the season-two finale. After using Patience’s positive COVID test to worm out of rehearsal, Val faces off with the director, who tries to cut her down by saying, “We get it, Valerie. You can’t do it.” Her response shows tremendous growth: “Okay, who said I could? I can’t dance. I can’t sing. I’m not a Broadway-caliber performer. Why’d you ask me?” And as someone who has seen multiple Bravolebs onstage at the Ambassador, great question! In more standard Val fashion, she takes advantage of the WGA strike and the then-impending SAG-AFTRA strike to suggest that she has to leave Chicago in solidarity. It’s a nonsensical excuse, but no one bothers to call her out on it.

The biggest twist of The Comeback season three arrives in the next scene: We discover that the whole show is not in mockumentary format, instead returning to the Steadicam that closed out the second season. Sure, Patience is still filming with a cell phone for Val’s socials, but Jane is nowhere to be seen. (Silverman, a full-time cast member, will presumably be back next week.) We get a brief scene on the picket line, where Val is marching mostly to get a pic with Fran Drescher (cameo-ing as herself) and because of her pathological need to be loved by writers. (To be fair, her experience with Paulie G would have scarred anyone.) We then jump ahead three years to the present day for another catch-up. If I have one bigger complaint about this episode, it’s that it tries to cover a bit too much ground — this is HBO; you can go over 30 minutes! In 2026, Valerie is recording Cherish the Time, a pitch-perfect representation of a celebrity podcast on which the celebrity has absolutely nothing to say. (“So what else, podcast listeners? What have I been doing? Um … saw a wonderful old movie the other night on TV.” Chills.) Unsurprisingly to anyone familiar with Val’s career trajectory and the current state of the business, work seems to have dried up. She did two seasons in the titular role on a detective series called Mrs. Hatt that no one saw (it was on Epix), and she has a six-line part in a microbudget indie she had to audition and provide her own wardrobe for.

She has also moved into a new place in fancy Sierra Towers, which she doesn’t seem thrilled about. Sure, Val is a better actress than she’s often given credit for, but she can’t sell it when she tells agent turned manager Billy (Dan Bucatinsky), “Mark and Valerie’s new chapter. I couldn’t be happier.” Thankfully, Billy is there with great news: Streaming service NuNet (formerly the Net, now owned by Comspot Collaborations — we live in hell) is ready to offer Val a starring role on a new multi-cam. “So sitcoms are making a comeback? Yeah, knew they would,” Valerie says. I was grateful to have Patience filming because we get a classic Comeback moment with Val looking directly into the camera to somberly reflect, “People need a laugh … now more than ever.” The catch is that the NuNet sitcom is being written entirely by AI, which is enough to keep her from signing on right away. Later in bed — and thank you, Sierra Towers, for the familiar overhead cameras — Valerie tells Mark that she doesn’t think she can take the meeting. “I need writers to like me, you know, and AI was what that whole strike was about,” she explains. Mark, who has seen his wife tortured by TV writers (or at least one in particular), doesn’t think Val owes writers anything. Is she really going to throw away an opportunity over some very loosely held principles? I like it better when Mark is a voice of reason, but I can’t really expect much from the current star of his own reality series, Finance Dudes.

The next day, Val shows up to the assisted-living facility where she’s filming the indie movie and learns, to her horror, that she misread the script: It’s not an ’80s period piece but a film where nearly everyone is in their 80s. Her fitness-instructor character is stuck in the past, something that obviously hits close to home for Val, who is feeling especially tender after being relegated to the role of day player. The only positive of the experience is her run-in with Tommy Tomlin (Jack O’Brien), who did guest-cast hair on I’m It! and occasionally filled in for Mickey. That the character of Tommy is now filling in for Mickey — Robert Michael Morris died in 2017 — sort of goes without saying. Tommy is here to remind Valerie of her past and of her future (he’s 85). He also delivers the kind of fawning praise that she craves when he tells her, “Being funny’s never been a problem for you, Val. Everything you did on I’m It! was hilarious.” By the time Valerie gets to set, she’s ready to give it her all. It helps that Tommy has reminded her that “we’re lucky to be alive; every day is a blessing.” And that point is hammered home when one of the assisted-living-resident extras has a cardiac event mid-scene. That’s enough to send Val fleeing (“It’s not a bit, it’s not a bit!”) and to seize the moment. She’ll take the NuNet meeting.

Give Her Another Take:

• Mickey’s absence is keenly felt throughout the episode. Did anyone else get a little teary at his photo on her dressing-room mirror? Tommy hasn’t been around enough to leave much of an impression, but I wish he felt less like a one-to-one replacement. 

• O’Brien, who plays Tommy, is a Tony-winning theater director, making his screen acting debut at 86. So far, he seems like a natural. 

• Speaking of new additions, I liked the recurring bit of Patience’s ailments and injuries, though it does strike me as a somewhat lazy comment on Gen-Z frailty. 

• There are some fun Broadway cameos in this episode. In addition to Fairchild, Val’s Billy Flynn is played by Timothy Hughes, famously known as the tall guy from Hadestown. Another recognizable theater actor, Nick Adams, gets a nasty read when Val asks why she was cast in Chicago, telling her, “Guess they were up to the V’s.”

• Because I’ve heard countless Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS curtain-call speeches, I laughed out loud at Valerie’s “You know what? Broadway doesn’t care no matter how many hats and T-shirts say it does.” 

• A really great attempt at keeping up with the times from Val: “Without a script, I could be signing up for a show about a stripper … sex worker; that’s what they like to be called now.” Her heart, as always, is in the right place. 

• But her good nature extends only so far. I enjoyed the reveal of how long she was really on the picket line when she tells Mark, “I was there, in the heat, marching with those writers, connecting with them, that whole day.”