--- description: Lisa Kudrow's clueless sitcom star returns as an unexpected champion for warts-and-all humanity in the concluding chapter of HBO's cult-classic reality TV spoof. title: The Comeback's Hollywood Satire Is Sharper Than Ever in a Poignant Final Season image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt99114c15745c9382/69b9769bae477631eef93f68/lisa-kudrow.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) ## Entertainment Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close * [Television](/tag/television/) ## Television Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close # _The Comeback_'s Hollywood Satire Is Sharper Than Ever in a Poignant Final Season Mar 17, 2026 6:21 PM CUT  Lisa Kudrow in Season 3 of 'The Comeback' Lisa Kudrow in Season 3 of 'The Comeback'Erin Simkin/HBO  by [Judy Berman](/author/judy-berman/)  ## Judy Berman Update your preferences in [Account Settings](/account/preferences/) Close TV Critic Mar 17, 2026 6:21 PM CUT The question screams out from the cover of _Entertainment Weekly_, in yellow letters superimposed over a tan, fit man and woman dressed as a sexy doctor and nurse, her stethoscope pressed to a staticky TV set: “Is [Reality TV](https://time.com/collections/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/ "undefined") Dying?” Before we see the words, the camera follows [Valerie Cherish](https://time.com/3560667/hbo-comeback-review/ "undefined")’s gaze as she spots the magazine at a newsstand. She deflates. Of course she does; Valerie, the floundering ’90s sitcom star played by the beloved ’90s sitcom star [Lisa Kudrow](https://time.com/4696427/lisa-kudrow-talk-friends-television/ "undefined") in HBO’s showbiz comedy _The Comeback_, is right at that moment shooting a reality show. “What are we doing?” she asks her producer. She’s talking about the shoot, but the inquiry is also existential. More than two decades have passed since this scene aired, in 2005\. Now, the idea that [reality TV](https://time.com/6588093/we-ruined-reality-tv-essay/ "undefined") might have been a fad, approaching its expiration date just five years after [_Survivor_](https://time.com/collections/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6197745/survivor-season-1/ "undefined") changed primetime and one year after [_The Apprentice_](https://time.com/collections/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6197770/the-apprentice/ "undefined") changed the course of American history, is inconceivable. In retrospect, even if it hadn’t minted a [two-term President](https://time.com/tag/donald-trump/ "undefined"), its low production costs and soapy addictiveness were always going to cement its place in pop culture—outlasting, among other entertainment-industry institutions, [_EW_’s run as a weekly print magazine](https://deadline.com/2022/02/entertainment-weekly-to-halt-print-edition-meredith-iac-barry-diller-1234929666/ "undefined"). Reality TV neither died nor, as cable and then streaming expanded the number of shows that got made in every genre, crowded out scripted programming and the unionized screenwriters and actors who make it. In the mid-aughts, however, both outcomes seemed possible. The people whose livelihoods relied on one small-screen format or the other panicked accordingly. Created by Kudrow and [_Sex and the City_](https://time.com/7289901/sex-and-the-city-episodes-age-well/ "undefined") franchise mainstay Michael Patrick King, _The Comeback_ mirrored those anxieties throughout its first season, which followed Valerie as she returned to the sitcom soundstage in dual roles: one, as the star of said sitcom, and the other as herself in an unscripted series about the making of the sitcom.. Each of the show’s three seasons—but especially the current and final one, which premieres March 22 on HBO—has been a perceptive snapshot of Hollywood’s discontents at a given moment as well as a hilarious work of cringe comedy. Taken together, its 21-year arc captures the intertwined evolution of scripted television and its vulgar doppelgänger reality TV, the former undergoing monumental shifts as the latter [was helping to reshape society](https://time.com/collections/reality-tv-most-influential-seasons/6199108/reality-tv-influence-on-world/ "undefined"). _The Comeback_ has always squinted into the camera and wondered: “What are we doing?” If ever there was a time to pause for reflection on that point, it’s the present. ---  Ella Stiller and Laura Silverman as Patience and Jane, documenting Valerie's new endeavors. Erin Simkin/HBO Valerie would be a great A-lister. She’s kind to her shows’ crews and brings the writers cookies on late nights. She supports younger women in the industry. And she’s a pretty good sport. If a scene requires her to do pratfalls in a cupcake costume or simulate oral sex on Seth Rogen or writhe around tied up in the trunk of a hot car with a live snake crawling all over her, she’s game. If she were Cate Blanchett or Viola Davis, this would qualify as magnanimity. But since she’s Valerie Cherish, whose biggest claim to fame is starring in an instantly dated sitcom called _I’m It!_ that flamed out after casting a monkey, her _noblesse_ doesn’t exactly feel _oblige_. What makes the character so funny—and occasionally poignant, and above all ideal for reality TV—is her failure to understand how she’s perceived. That lack of self-awareness makes her the perfect grist for Hollywood’s eternally grinding mill. Short on charisma but hungry for positive reinforcement, Valerie is always desperately chasing work. The more she tries to project the image of a savvy insider, dropping names and mangling showbiz jargon, the more she reveals her naiveté. So she falls for—or, as she might see it, adapts to—every trend and gimmick. It’s implied that she lands her “comeback” role, as tracksuit-clad spinster Aunt Sassy on the horny sitcom _Room and Bored_, whose real stars are hot 20-somethings, because other actors refused to be surveilled by a reality crew. They must feel good about that choice by the end of the HBO show’s first season, when the unscripted series also titled _The Comeback_ premieres and Valerie is edited to look like a monster. Mid-2000s reality TV was, after all, notoriously misogynistic. Makeover pageant _The Swan_ sliced up “ugly ducklings,” while _Joe Millionaire_ laid a dating-show trap for alleged gold diggers. Val might have guessed what she was in for when her network promoted her show alongside one called _America’s Next Great Porn Star_ and another where newlyweds beat each other with lead pipes. When the [second season ](https://time.com/3560482/review-the-comeback/ "undefined")opened, in 2014, Valerie was hamming it up in student horror flicks and hawking hair dye made from “a special cantaloupe in France.” Its predecessor’s show-within-the-show had been prescient about reality’s middle-aged-rich-lady gold rush; Bravo’s [_Real Housewives_ franchise](https://time.com/5929741/real-housewives-beginners-guide/ "undefined") debuted in 2006, attracting the same audience of girls and gays that had made _The Comeback_ a cult classic after the Season 1 finale drew less than a million viewers and HBO canceled it. Val faces off with [Lisa Vanderpump](https://time.com/4559971/lisa-vanderpump-interview-dogs/ "undefined"), one of many reality-star cameos in the season, in a clip that shows her quitting an early incarnation of _The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills_. Reality TV was, by the mid-2010s, an entrenched genre whose most bankable personalities, like Vanderpump, wielded power behind the camera. And with production going lo-fi for platforms like YouTube and Instagram, Val hires a crew of incompetent college kids to record a self-funded video series whose editing she plans to control. Then the obnoxious writer who antagonized her on _Room and Bored_, Paulie G. (Lance Barber), persuades her to play a twisted version of herself in the edgy HBO dramedy he’s basing on their relationship. Premium cable, with its grit and cursing and nudity, is not the natural habitat of an actor who thrives on the chuckles of studio audiences. Val endures scenes replete with violence and sexual degradation because she longs for the prestige of a network that was then at its most relevant with [_Game of Thrones_](https://time.com/game-of-thrones-2017/ "undefined") in its prime, [_Girls_ driving the cultural conversation](https://time.com/4665930/girls-final-season-lena-dunham/ "undefined"), and leeway to make difficult masterpieces like [_The Leftovers_](https://time.com/2923387/review-leftovers-hbo-damon-lindelof/ "undefined"). (Alas, [#MeToo](https://time.com/7305402/epstein-scandal-metoo-movement/ "undefined") and its influx of intimacy coordinators were still a few years off.) The unthinkable happens: For her suffering, Valerie Cherish wins an Emmy. Yet she isn’t at the ceremony to accept her award. In the Season 2 finale, she ducks out on what would have been the proudest moment of her life to be at the hospital bedside of her loyal, cancer-stricken hairstylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris). She may be vain, silly, myopic, grasping, deluded. She is probably what Bill Murray [purportedly](https://ultimateclassicrock.com/caddyshack-bill-murray-chevy-chase/ "undefined") called Chevy Chase: a medium talent. But she’s not a bad or mean person. There’s a limit to her self-centeredness, and in reaching it at the Emmys, she snaps out of the career mania that has started to drive away her indulgent, non-Hollywood husband, Mark (Damian Young). It doesn’t just save their marriage; it makes us care what happens to Valerie. And it sets her up to be a hero of sorts in Season 3. ---  Finally a producer, Valerie Cherish (Kudrow, center) presides over a table read. Erin Simkin/HBO The 12-year interval since we last checked in with Valerie has felt like a lifetime, as the pace of political conflict and climate change and technological advancement all accelerated at dizzying rates. The TV landscape has shifted just as rapidly. [Netflix’s mid-2010s foray into original content](https://time.com/5484106/too-much-netflix-content/ "undefined") yielded an era known as [Peak TV](https://time.com/4389167/peak-tv-means-a-boost-for-character-actors/ "undefined"), with its unprecedented abundance of new platforms and series, followed by a [still-unfolding corrective yet chaoticperiod](https://time.com/6253697/streaming-wars-disney-chaos-era/ "undefined") marked by contraction, consolidation, and conservatism. Meanwhile, social media in the video-driven age of TikTok has entirely collapsed boundaries between reality TV and reality. For so many of us, famous and not, performing a persona into a camera for consumption by strangers is simply living life. So it’s fitting that our first glimpse of Val in Season 3 is filtered through multiple lenses. In a flashback to 2023, the Writers Guild strike is on, and our compulsively industrious protagonist is using the time to make her Broadway debut, in the same _Chicago_ role that has welcomed reality TV veterans like [Ariana Madix](https://time.com/6260504/vanderpump-rules-drama-explained/ "undefined") and Erika Jayne. Laura Silverman’s Jane, a producer of the_Comeback_ reality show turned high-minded documentarian whose chronic financial woes keep her tied to Val, is shooting behind-the-scenes footage—and jostling for space with a Gen Z social media attaché, Patience (Ella Stiller), whose smartphone camera is always on. When the divine Miss C proves incompetent at song and dance, the show hurtles towards the present, in a premiere overstuffed with timely references (COVID) and fan-pleasing guest stars ([Fran Drescher](https://time.com/collections/person-of-the-week-podcast/6313681/fran-drescher-interview-person-of-the-week/ "undefined")). _The Comeback_ nods to Peak TV with frequent callbacks to a cozy mystery series called _Mrs. Hatt_; Val played the title role, but no one watched or even knew it existed because it aired on Epix. She endorses brands on social media just to show she’s “open to collabs.” Like everyone else with a list of “Self” credits on IMDb, she has a podcast; Patience records the video version. The season soon finds its focus in that final boss of contemporary workplace crises: AI. Val’s stalwart manager, Billy (Kudrow's producing partner, Dan Bucatinsky), approaches her with a dream project. Now that everything old is new again, from broad multicam sitcoms to ad-supported free TV, she’s being offered the lead role in _How’s That?!,_ a retro comedy set at a bed and breakfast. She will even be an executive producer. The only catch is that the show will, secretly at first but openly in the event that it succeeds, be scripted primarily by an [artificial intelligence](https://time.com/tag/ai/ "undefined"), which—like the Paul Simon song—they call "Al." Having posed for selfies with [Drescher on the SAG-AFTRA picket line](https://time.com/6295968/fran-drescher-interview-sag-aftra-strike/ "undefined"), Val has concerns about a project that would cut out her Writers’ Guild comrades. But the executive behind _How’s That?_ ([Andrew Scott](https://time.com/6962630/ripley-review-netflix-andrew-scott/ "undefined")’s Brandon) assures her the WGA signed off. There are even human showrunners, a conspicuously incompatible husband-and-wife team played by [John Early](https://time.com/6137793/search-party-season-5-review/ "undefined") and [Abbi Jacobson](https://time.com/4370557/abbi-jacobson-ilana-glazer-broad-city-hillary-clinton/ "undefined"). “Al is really extraordinary,” Brandon enthuses to Val. “After all, it picked you.” So begins a deeply bizarre shoot, which Jane is eager to document. Unlike Val, she instantly comprehends the profound implications of an AI-written sitcom. The showrunners are checked out. If a joke doesn’t land, dozens of alternate punchlines are generated within seconds—but who has the time to sift through all that derivative content? Video game characters inexplicably pop up in scripts. The cast is told that Al is a human working remotely but can tell something’s off. As the only producer who’s on set on a daily basis, Val suddenly has problems she can’t fix by giving everyone a thoughtfully selected aromatherapy candle. She turns to her old colleagues, industry veterans that she trusts to do good work. James Burrows, the legendary sitcom creator and director ([_The Mary Tyler Moore Show_](https://time.com/collections/all-time-100-tv-shows/3103636/the-mary-tyler-moore-show/ "undefined"), [_Cheers_](https://time.com/collections/all-time-100-tv-shows/3101498/cheers/ "undefined"), [_Friends_](https://time.com/4232124/revelations-friends-reunion-tv-tribute/ "undefined"), [_Frasier_](https://time.com/6320681/frasier-reboot-review/ "undefined")) who has appeared as himself on _The Comeback_ since its first season, agrees to direct the pilot. In doing Val that favor, he realizes that a show written by AI might turn out fine, but it will never be great, because scripts reconstituted (some might say plagiarized) from the annals of pop culture can’t be surprising. “Surprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner, beating themselves up to beat out a better joke,” he says. “It’s the chubby guy who’s a secret alcoholic. It’s the gay guy who, despite all the work he’s done, still hates himself a little. Or the funny woman who’s been invisible for way too long. They turn all that pain into a joke. And Val, those broken, beautiful souls are what make something great.” It’s an uncharacteristically earnest, sentimental moment for a show that usually makes its points about Hollywood’s failings through awkwardness and absurdity. This shift in tone might put off viewers looking forward to another eight episodes of Val humiliating herself. Yet of all the many TV series that have taken on AI, from [_Black Mirror_](https://time.com/6287513/black-mirror-season-6-review/ "undefined") to [_Westworld_ ](https://time.com/5801384/westworld-season-3-review/ "undefined")to [_Mrs. Davis_](https://time.com/6271958/mrs-davis-review/ "undefined"), it’s the new season of _The Comeback_ that most trenchantly defines the stakes of letting computers take over the fundamentally human task of storytelling and disrupt the personal relationships that form between longtime collaborators. Paulie G. might have been the villain in 2005 and 2014, contorting Valerie Cherish into a caricature to appease his own demons. Reality TV, with its crude melodramas, might’ve been the _bête noire_ of serious actors and writers. But we’re all on the same inundated side in 2026, Team Human—cringey Vals and dark-souled Paulies, brilliant auteurs and reality stars with personality disorders—vs. Team Machine. In every sense that the question can be asked: _What are we doing?_ Let’s hope the answer surprises us. 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