The Comeback season three: Lisa Kudrow’s lacerating mockumentary ponders AI and the future of TV

Has there ever been a more apt name for a show that drops a new season every decade or so?

Did creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King know in 2005, when the series premiered, that they would be checking back in with the TV industry at points of pivot and existential dread?

At its conception, Kudrow had just come off 10 years of Friends, and leveraged her reputation as a sitcom star to play a meta version of one, Valerie Cherish, who was trying to mount her network TV return a decade after starring in a workplace comedy.

She had been cast as Aunt Sassy, the killjoy matron landlord to a group of hot twentysomethings, only because she agreed to star in a simultaneous reality TV series called The Comeback, charting the behind-the-scenes drama of a “middle-aged has been” (Kudrow was a touch over 40 at this point).

It was presented as “found footage” from the reality TV crew, a lacerating mockumentary of ageism, Hollywood power dynamics and the desperation of being relevant. It also captured what the industry at the time felt was a huge threat to scripted series: the rise of reality TV.

As Valerie points out nine years later, she was there at the beginning, when the only other reality TV stars were Survivor contestants eating bugs.

When The Comeback returned in 2014 for a second season, it was the peak of prestige TV, and Valerie found herself on a gritty cable drama that was a thinly veiled re-framing of the experiences of making the sitcom-within-the-show in 2005, written by Paulie G (Lance Barber), the writer who had tortured her a decade earlier.

Across its first two seasons, The Comeback portrayed astute insights into the TV business, whether it was the heightened anxiety over reality TV or the problematic show creator, almost always a man, who was allowed to get away with poor behaviour in the name of “art”.

After the death in 2017 of Robert Michael Morris, who played Mickey, Valerie’s best friend, confidant and long-time hairdresser, Kudrow had said that she didn’t want to revisit the world of The Comeback.

The series had also left Valerie in a good place, where she finally realised that her relationships are more important than the shallow aspirations of fame and glory.

But now there’s a very good reason to check back in because there’s a new bogeyman stalking every creative industry: AI.

When the American writers and actors guilds were striking almost three years ago, AI was nipping at the edges of the entertainment industry but in that short amount of time has already being adopted in various ways by studios big and small, including Disney which took a financial stake in OpenAI and has committed to rolling out user-generated AI shorts on its streaming platform.

Filmmakers such as Ben Affleck and Darren Aronofsky have formed their own AI business, and for the hundreds of thousands of people working in Hollywood, it’s not a matter of if but when

The official line is that it’s merely a “tool” that’s not going to supplant human beings, which is being met, correctly, with scepticism.

The Comeback is tapping directly into this conversation, and using its platform and narrative framework to

Twelve years on from winning an Emmy, and now 60 years old, Valerie is still constantly striving, trying to creatively subsist on low-budget (or is that no-budget) independent films, until her publicist-turned-manager Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) comes to her with an offer.

A relaunched TV channel wants her to front a new sitcom, but the catch is that the show will be the first be written by AI. Also, it’s a secret because the network, led by a villainous studio head (Andrew Scott), wants the show, How’s That!, to be a proof-of-concept.

It’s a real ethical dilemma. Valerie just wants to work, and especially in her favourite format, the multi-cam sitcom, and, at first, she’s able to self-justify her decision to, essentially, screw over writers because there will be two humans (John Early and Abbi Jacobson) who will, in theory, serve as showrunners.

But it becomes increasingly clear that the situation is less-than-ideal, and becomes even more complicated as the season goes on as more and more industry voices weigh in.

On the one hand, Valerie hasn’t always had a good relationship with writers, who tend to not want to hear what actors have to say – calling back to her constant demand for assurance that she’s been heard – but she also knows that there is a real fight going on.

There are questions of integrity, creativity and solidarity, up against Valerie’s ingrained impetus to work.

The Comeback has a perspective on the encroachment of AI, and it ends the season – this is not a spoiler – with the disclaimer that no AI was used in the writing of this TV show.

It would’ve been a wild twist for this show, created by two TV veterans in Kudrow and King (Sex and the City, Cybill, Two Broke Girls), to break on the side of the tech companies.

The series is not as acerbic or cringe as it was in its first iteration, and it’s far more generous to Valerie now than 21 years earlier, in part because it’s been able to show proper growth over the three seasons. She is still, sometimes, a ridiculous person but there is real compassion to explain why she chooses to do what she does.

There are familiar faces including Barber, Laura Silverman as documentary maker and reality TV producer Jane, Damian Young as Valerie’s husband Mark, James Burrows and Malin Akerman, as well as some big-name celebs.

For the past two decades, The Comeback has been this unexpected barometer for where the industry is at, but how much should we read into about its future now that Kudrow has said that this is very much the final chapter of the show?

It would be easier, albeit more depressing, to wallow in pessimism, but as we saw with season two, The Comeback has an optimist’s heart, and it uses its human creativity and voice to mount a rousing defence for exactly that.

All is not lost.

The Comeback is streaming on HBO Max