If you thought Valerie Cherish had nothing left to say, think again.
The Comeback has a gift for timing that borders on the supernatural. In 2005, it skewered reality TV before most of us had even fully realised just what it was. In 2014, it embraced the era of the antihero prestige drama. Now, twelve years on, Valerie Cherish walks straight back into our lives and into the most frightening story Hollywood has to tell itself: the AI moment. And somehow, improbably, this is the best the show has ever been.
What’s most striking about Season 3 is how the world has caught up with Valerie. She was always the most desperately hungry person in any room, her survival mode set to default. But now, everybody’s in survival mode. Jane, the Academy Award-winning documentarian who filmed Valerie’s original reality show, is working the register at a supermarket – Trader Joe’s. Valerie’s husband, Mark, has signed up for a reality show about finance guys and her manager Billy is less interested in managing Valerie’s career and more concerned with getting into the industry himself. The gap between Valerie Cherish and the rest of the world has closed completely, especially now she has a few TV shows under her “Hatt” (I promise that joke will make sense in a few weeks) and the show mines that shift for comedy, pathos, and something genuinely close to a dystopian horror.
The new TV show is “How’s That?!”, the streaming sitcom Valerie is handed the lead in, scripted, the network quietly insists, by AI. The show still has showrunners through the characters of Mary and Josh (Abbi Jacobson and John Early), who have both been reduced to babysitters for an algorithm, while the network CEO, played by a perfectly blasé, yet still endearing Andrew Scott, demands that the AI’s involvement stay secret from the cast and crew. Valerie, naturally, is too busy managing her angles to grasp the enormity of what she’s participating in, and if you know Valerie Cherish as much as I do, you know that she can NEVER keep a secret.
The show’s portrayal of AI is remarkably precise. It doesn’t go for the easy dystopian freakouts. Early on, the tool is practically seductive, generating dozens of script alternatives before any human writer could think of one, landing jokes with a live studio audience. It works, it gains a positive reaction from the audience. Until it doesn’t. The hallucinations creep in. The alternatives become blander recycled noise. One of Valeri’s confused co-star receives a new script and mutters, “I’m pretty sure I did this sheriff’s joke way back on ‘Mama’s Family.’ The Comeback understands that the horror of AI isn’t that it’s obviously terrible; it’s that it’s just convincing enough, for just long enough, that everyone agrees to go along with it because it’s not taking away everyone’s jobs, just some of them.
Back for his third round in this series is legendary sitcom director James Burrows, who worked with Kudrow on Friends. He plays a version of himself here and articulates the show’s thesis with beautiful simplicity. Instead of acting as the showrunner, he simply comes along to observe the effects that AI has on the process of the show and try and reason with Valerie over her decision to partake in this experiment.
And then there is Lisa Kudrow. For two decades, she has poured all of her creative genius into this character, and she has somehow found new places to take her. Valerie Cherish is one of the great comic creations in American television. She is deluded, relentless, yet somehow still human, probably more so in this season than she has ever been before. Kudrow inhabits her so completely that the boundary between actor and role simply dissolves. But it’s in the quieter scenes, particularly a brief shot of Valerie’s make-up table with a photo of Mickey (gone since 2017, his absence handled with real tenderness), leading into an incredibly tender moment for the series, farewelling one of its staples in the late Robert Michael Morris with nothing but class.
What Kudrow does so brilliantly in this season is reframe Valerie’s defining quality, her sheer refusal to be humiliated, or as she puts it, “I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up” she sees this no longer as a flaw but as a superpower. In a world where everyone else is busy, Valerie Cherish just keeps swinging. It is good to see that character progression from season one. Her insecurities still lie there just below the surface, but a full face of makeup shields them. She is more human and down-to-earth now than she has ever been. She is aware of the gift that she has been given through a recent string of hits since the Comeback documentary aired, and she refuses to let anyone take that away from her.
The Comeback Season 3 is both a love letter to television comedy and the beloved sitcom that loosely exists now. While it does give a definitive answer at the end about what is potentially in store for us if media companies head down this path, it allows the viewers to make their own minds as to where AI fits into the television landscape. It’s all done so beautifully and hilariously through the character of Valerie Cherish.
The Comeback Season 3 premieres March 22 on HBO Max.
