Valerie Cherish is back for one more go-around.
The Lisa Kudrow character, a veteran sitcom actress trying to survive Hollywood in endlessly cringey ways, returns for a third and final season of The Comeback — this time following Valerie as she stars in the first multicam written by AI.
Kudrow introduced the character with the show’s first season in 2005, then revived Valerie for the second season in 2014, when she (and her iconic catchphrases) truly became a pop culture phenomenon. Though the show serves largely as a satire of entertainment industry and those who operate within it, there is some truth to it all, as Kudrow saw in Hollywood’s reception of Valerie.
“In the beginning, I would go to things and actresses would come up to me — known actresses that I admired a lot — and just sort of lean in and say, ‘I’m so afraid that’s me,’” Kudrow told The Hollywood Reporter at the show’s L.A. premiere on Thursday. “I said, ‘No, of course that’s not you.’ But that’s how much Valerie lives inside every actor, every actress, every writer, everybody who knows when they shouldn’t say something but they have very loud thoughts about it and says it and tries to be charming about it and thinks maybe she can make an impact, and you can’t because no one is listening to you.”
Michael Patrick King, who created the series alongside Kudrow, echoed, ” As I said to somebody once, this is a documentary, always. It’s not fantastical. Lisa’s ability to be Valerie is so unique, but it’s a composite of everyone she’s ever seen that’s like this. We’re all like this, we’re all Valerie, we’re all thinking we’re not enough — the writers, the actors, the crew members. Everyone is in the mix, just Valerie is the only one who is so naked for our enjoyment.”
Michael Patrick King, Lisa Kudrow and HBO’s Casey Bloys at the premiere.
Araya Doheny/Getty Images for HBO
Kudrow also explained the decision to make this the final season, despite the fact that she and King operate on an untraditional schedule of roughly one season per decade and could have a new idea in a few years.
“When we realized this is about her confronting — in her way not confronting — AI writing a sitcom that she’s on, we realized, oh this is like the very beginning, Valerie on a reality show before there were Housewives anywhere,” she said. “So it felt like this is now a trilogy and now it looks like the point of this whole thing is we were taking a snapshot of this industry at what was thought to be an extinction event.”
King emphasized, “We’re very practical, and we knew it took us a very long time for the universe to present to us another doorway to walk through. We had lots of ideas over the last 10 years but none that were big enough to say we’ll risk it again, we’ll do it again,” until it came to the threat of AI, where “the fears lead right into comedy for us, the idea that everyone is terrified.”
“What I like particularly about it as a subject is it’s not just Hollywood, it’s everywhere,” he continued. “Way back in the beginning of The Comeback people said, ‘Oh it’s a show about Hollywood and an actress.’ Now it’s a show about humans and jobs.”
One key difference in the third season will also be the absence of Valerie’s hairstylist and confidant Mickey Deane, following actor Robert Michael Morris’ death in 2017.
“It definitely made me not even consider doing any more after season two for a while,” Kudrow admitted. “Aside from just missing Robert Michael Morris, Mickey is such a crucial character. That’s sort of our audience, we can always pan over to Mickey when Valerie says something and he’s like, ‘I don’t know if that made sense,’ and still supporting her. So that was hard but then we realized Valerie may have also decided not to deal with it much when Mickey passed, but now she’ll have to.”
The Comeback season three premieres Sunday on HBO.
