Final review ‘The Comeback’: an undeserved happy ending
SPOILER ALERT: The following piece contains plot details from the series finale of “The Comeback,” now streaming on HBO Max.
Five minutes before the credits roll, “The Comeback” will end on a grim note. Valerie Cherish, the sitcom actor and groundbreaking reality star, played with sustained jubilation by comedy master Lisa Kudrow, is trapped. She’s finally the face of a hit show, the classic multi-camera “How’s That?!” on the NuNet streaming service. But that’s her Also the face of television written by artificial intelligence, a fact that more than 70% of the audience seems to have no problem with.
In signing this Faustian bargain, Valerie has been hoisted by her own petard. Once she finally decides she can’t live with scripts written by robots anymore after NuNet chief Brandon (Andrew Scott) insults her home of sitcoms because ‘easy-peasy’ shows that ‘no genius is needed’ – Valerie tries to run away, but discovers that she too can be replaced by AI. (She signed away the rights to her likeness through DocuSign.) Later, Valerie debates the dilemma with her husband Mark (Damian Young): stick to her principles and let a machine get all the credit (“cut off my nose to fight my face,” in a typical Valerie malapropism) or stick with a workplace where her demands are disrespected and her contributions are demeaned. “I think we both know what you’re going to do,” Mark sighs. He means that he should swallow the humiliation and return to the set, as Valerie has done so many times before.
But Valerie miraculously manages to find a way out. Powerful showrunner Jack Stevens (Bradley Whitford), who had previously begged Valerie to speak out on behalf of the writers at the show’s renewal press conference, texts her with an offer. (Valerie did share an embarrassing story about the studio’s AI being shut down when it hit a paywall, but it was a spontaneous act motivated by personal grudge, not out of principled protest.) He writes a role specifically for her: a woman with a certain gravitas (not age), who is funny and has a moral compass. Valerie can also maintain her stardom and her integrity, even though the rest of her industry may not be so lucky. The end credits let us know that she will win a second Emmy for “Judge’s Table,” the story of judge and chef Eleanor Judge.
The conclusion was a fitting end to the final season’s “The Comeback,” in which Kudrow and her creative partner Michael Patrick King seemed torn between competing priorities. On the one hand, they wanted to sound the alarm about the intrusion of AI into creative work, a bleak satire to match the reality parody of Season 1 or the airing of prestigious, tortured and human-offending projects from Season 2. On the other hand, they wanted to pay tribute to Valerie Cherish, an indelible character that they have been the stewards of for most of this century. When documentary filmmaker Jane (Laura Silverman) lovingly tells Valerie, “I’ve been watching you for twenty years,” she’s speaking to an audience that is undoubtedly vicariously proud of her achievements.
The tension between these two objectives ultimately proved irreconcilable. Kudrow and King said the devastating farewell fondly, insulating Valerie from the consequences of the very changes they had done so much to dramatize. (They also took some poetic license in the process: there are protections against both AI writing and image reuse in the WGA and SAG contracts as a result of the double strikes depicted in the season premiere.) This trend was already visible before the finale; in the penultimate episode, Valerie runs into her former co-star Juna (Malin Akerman) on the backlot, where the now superstar breathlessly tells her counterpart, “To me, you It.The line isn’t entirely convincing in the context of Juna’s relative success or Valerie’s ongoing scandal as a mascot for AI writing, which Juna is trying to make her feel better about. But it feels good to hear it anyway. Doesn’t the woman who once puked on camera in a cupcake costume deserve to ride off into the sunset?
I’m as conflicted about the answer to that question as the show is. “The Comeback” is Valerie Cherish and vice versa. But what if the interests of the character and her story are no longer completely aligned? Valerie was allowed to grow in meaningful ways over the course of the series. In the season 2 finale, she skipped the Emmys to visit her beloved hairstylist Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) on his sickbed, and in season 3 she steps into the role of executive producer, advocating for her castmates and – yes – writers from her first real position of authority. Yet she’s still someone who has accepted an AI-scripted role to begin with, and more importantly, working in a declining, disrupted field that repeatedly puts her in such impossible positions. I can believe that both Valerie and Hollywood have evolved, albeit in opposite directions, but how much?
Yet I’m still powerless to the pleasures of the final scene, in which Valerie sits down for a final talking head interview with Jane. As the image slowly transitions from black and white to color, and from grainy fuzziness to sharper resolution, Valerie rebukes the shame that, to the outsider, is her defining characteristic. “I never felt that – humiliation,” she says. “I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up.” It is a powerful reclamation of agency, emphasizing that Valerie had a say in it everything that happened to her, both good and (often) bad. And it’s a more complex, less obvious comment to draw on than Jane’s earlier observation: “It all worked out at last – what an evolution you’ve had!”
In the final hours of ‘The Comeback’, the unconvincingly cheerful and the rewardingly nuanced jostled against each other until the final moments. The closing joke, a callback to Jane directs Valerie’s proclamation that “Well, I got it!” with the tables turned, it was somehow both at the same time: a bit of blatant fanservice And a reflection of Valerie’s elevated position, connected by the meta-commentary that underpins the show. Valerie Cherish, rightly or wrongly, can have it all; ‘The Comeback’, successful or not, did its best.
