Summary
The Comeback Season 3 continues to meld old and new in “Valerie Has a Secret”, a Valerie gets a bit more hands-on with her new sitcom.
It’s hard to talk about a mockumentary – even though The Comeback has stopped being one in Season 3, at least for long stretches – without talking about The Office. And there are, to be fair, a lot of similarities between Valerie Cherish and David Brent, especially the original, British version, who was a mostly well-intentioned guy, a little past his heyday, desperate to be noticed. Valerie has been noticed, which is the biggest distinction between the two, but the comedy lives in the same place, in the gap between how the character perceives themselves and how other people perceive them. This is especially apparent at the start of Episode 2, “Valerie Has a Secret”, with Valerie trying to project the pro-union, anti-AI image of an artistic purist while simultaneously trying to justify a lucrative starring role in a new sitcom written almost entirely by AI.
Unlike the premiere, which kept this sitcom at arm’s length, we get a good look at it here, or at least at the leadership of NuNet, the network behind it. At the start of the half-hour, Valerie and a more-useless-than-ever Billy, now rocking trendy corporate power-skirts, turn up at NuNet’s empty offices for a meeting with the head honcho, Brandon, and a menagerie of executives who all beam in via Zoom for a deeply insincere how-do-you-do that is horribly awkward even before Valerie mentions the AI of it all.
If it weren’t for the AI, it wouldn’t be the worst idea. The sitcom, How’s That?, is a multi-cam about a “woman of a certain age” that is essentially a Fawlty Towers knock-off and occasionally breaks off to advertise products, which Valerie justifies as a throwback to the halycon days of live TV advertisements (time is, after all, a flat circle). But the second Valerie mentions the AI thing, Brandon immediately ends the call and dips into the conference room in person – he was in his office down the hall – to explain how that particular aspect of the production is being kept very hush-hush. After all, AI has a bad reputation, and it wouldn’t be good for marketing if word of its use got out ahead of time. And besides, the show does have writers, two uninterested dolts by the names of Josh and Mary, they’re just consulting with an AI script generator they’ve nicknamed “Al Assist”.
To a casual observer, it’s very obvious that this is going to go wrong in a variety of different ways, but it’s also obvious why Valerie could talk herself into it. There are real writers! She gets an executive producer credit! Her Hollywood star is on the rise! This is obviously the hook of The Comeback Season 3, and it’s one that Episode 2 leverages for all its worth, with Valerie immediately flexing her newfound social might to meet a cameoing Jane Fonda. She also baits Jane, who’s now working at a Trader Joe’s after losing everything in the 2025 wildfires, with the mention of a new TV role, even if he does whisper the secret about its artificially-intelligent underpinnings.
That’s another great recurring bit of “Valerie Has a Secret”. She’s not supposed to tell anyone about the AI thing and mentions it to virtually everyone she meets, including trying to downplay it in her own self-promotional social media updates. All of this remains funny throughout, but it’s only during a table read late on that The Comeback really feels like itself, since that’s the bit that makes most use of the cinema verite stuff as the various scenes-within-scenes begin to properly overlap. This is the show at its funniest and Kudrow at her best, and it’s also most redolent with the season’s inherent conflict, at least part of which is going to revolve around Josh and Mary – particularly the latter – seeing Valerie as an impediment to their creative process, despite that process being utterly bankrupt. It’s a recipe for disaster.
And disaster’s coming, make no mistake. Valerie can’t convince legendary director Jimmy Burrows to direct the pilot, but tells Jane he’s on board anyway, and she won’t even follow the directions of her car’s GPS, yet is pretending to be totally okay with a script generated almost entirely by an AI scriptwriter. Which is a secret, of course – one that she’s already told everyone about. Things aren’t off to a great start, are they?
