Summary
The Comeback has a point to prove in Season 3, and if “Valerie Works Like a Machine” is anything to go by, it hasn’t lost a step in its time off the air.
Given that The Comeback has always been a show with an eerie soothsaying quality about it, it’s really no surprise that Season 3 – which is the final one, for what that’s worth – is going to be about AI and the profound threat it represents to working actors and writers. To be fair, Episode 1, “Valerie Works Like a Machine”, only hints at this future instead of openly displaying it, but there are plenty of other things it needs to be establishing in the meantime. It has, after all, been 12 years since Season 2, and the key thing about the world of Lisa Kudrow’s HBO cult hit is that it doesn’t stand still when we’re not visiting.
And that’s the point, obviously. Things have moved on. On many levels, Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish has been left behind. Now 60, she isn’t exactly disgraced, but her career’s on a downturn, despite an Emmy win for Seeing Red, the drama the second season revolved around. A two-season stint on a cozy mystery series called Mrs. Hatt was a non-starter because it aired on Epix – “How many apps can a person have?” – and her asinine podcast, Cherish the Time, needs some guests at a bare minimum. When the premiere begins, Valerie’s starring in a Broadway adaptation during an ongoing writer’s strike – protesting, at least in part, AI – and realising very quickly that she can’t sing, dance, or tolerate theatre actors. She eventually quits, citing solidarity with her out-of-work writer brethren as justification, and using attendance at the marches as photo opportunities (she’s followed around by a social media person named Patience).
Valerie’s husband, Mark, isn’t faring much better, career-wise, having lost his job in finance thanks to what is implied to be an off-colour joke, and currently looking to star in a reality show called Finance Dudes, which it seems like Valerie pulled some strings to get him involved in. And that’s another thing. Valerie can still pull some strings – she and Mark are doing fine, beginning a “new chapter” of their lives in a swanky condo that Elton John once stayed in. Valerie’s desperate need to be in something isn’t because she’s poor; it’s because it doesn’t make sense to her that the evolving industry seems to have no place for Valerie Cherish.
What has always worked about Valerie as a character – that she’s a solid mid-tier performer with a bit of an inflated ego who nonetheless does care about her craft – also defines her here in Season 3, which is good because The Comeback is less about her specifically than it is entertainment more generally, having predicted the advent of reality TV and streaming with scary accuracy, and now turning its sights towards the next logical trend. In Episode 1, the prospect of dancing with the devil of AI is initially rejected on principle, but thanks to a ludicrous stint on the set of an indie film, it becomes the only way for Valerie to be doing something in the limelight.
Valerie’s manager, Billy, gives a solid pitch. Thanks to some inscrutable network merger, Valerie is being personally offered a starring role in a new multi-cam sitcom called How’s That?, with the key caveat being that it’s written entirely by AI. Or perhaps the more accurate way of saying that is it “will be” written by AI; there isn’t even a script, since the chatbot is presumably going to build the show around Valerie’s character, assuming she accepts the role (which, by the end of the premiere, she does.)
As well as establishing the new status quo plot-wise, “Valerie Works Like a Machine” also introduces an adaptation to the visual approach. The mockumentary style that characterised the first two seasons is greatly lessened here. There are still stretches in this style, often with Valerie talking directly into a phone camera, but a lot of the scenes are shot in a more traditional way. I don’t mind this – the mockumentary thing was massively successful during the reality TV boom because it perfectly captured and mocked the performative way people behave when they know they’re being filmed – but the flipping between aesthetics, including other cinema vérité flourishes like a scene of Valerie and Mark in bed filmed through their home security system, can be a little jarring.
But it’s clear that The Comeback has a point to prove in Season 3, as well as being a swansong outing for Kudrow’s magnum opus. It hasn’t lost a step over the years, at least if this premiere is anything to go by, and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes next for Valerie, especially once she gets on set and we get to see how all this AI business works.
