To label something ‘ahead of its time’ is to assume that the culture will inevitably catch up—the visions of the seer vindicated in a progressed future. And cult classics do often find their way to the mainstream, beloved anew as camp or clever kitsch. But some are meant to remain dangerous forever. Nearly 20 years after the debut of The Comeback and a decade after its historic series finale, the cruelest Hollywood satire of all time still feels too real.
At the end of the 20th century, pop culture predicted our current culture of fetishized surveillance: The Truman Show and The Matrix depict awakening in a simulated world. But The Comeback offered a darker vision, in which there may be no escape from the soundstage. Its protagonist, Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow), a faded sitcom actress attempting a career revival, is like a zoo animal bred in captivity. She knows nothing but survivalism, dancing like a monkey for capricious consumers.
Kudrow co-created The Comeback with Sex & the City architect Michael Patrick King; both were fresh off their own impossibly successful series. The first season of the meta-comedy, which premiered on HBO in 2005, follows Cherish as she is cast to play the shrill Aunt Sassy on the bland network sitcom Room & Bored. A documentary crew follows her too—and through that footage, we see behind-the-scenes of a series called The Comeback.
Indeed, fans of Friends longing for more Smelly Cat were likely frightened away by the ice-cold satire of The Comeback, which put Valerie through a Squid Game of humiliation, rarely handing her a victory. The series, especially in its first season, made no attempt to cover up the ageist, sexist animus which women in showbusiness—which is to say, women everywhere—face. Like the 1999 pitch-black pageant mockumentary Drop Dead Gorgeous, The Comeback had no interest in providing oxygen masks while the plane went down.
Valerie doesn’t quite qualify as a heroine or an antiheroine. She doesn’t share the self-effacing optimism of go-getters like Liz Lemon or Leslie Knope, nor does she willfully—and triumphantly—transgress like I May Destroy You’s Arabella or Girls’ Hannah Horvath. Valerie and her wingman Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) are relics from a time of outsize theatricality: the talentless TV starlet and the tacky old queen styling her hair. But it is precisely their lack of edginess that makes Valerie and Mickey icons for the abject. They’re garish and needy, and, most frighteningly for the men of Hollywood who want to fill their sets with the young and beautiful, they won’t fucking go away.
Robert Michael Morris as Mickey Deane and Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish in The Comeback
IMDB
Dazed and doing her best to manage multiple camera crews, Valerie is a hero of the dissociated. “She’s not an artist,” Kudrow once said of her creation. Perhaps her closest sisters would be Dawn Weiner, the besieged sixth-grader of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Louise Lasser’s delirious housewife on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and Laurie Metcalf’s tragically self-righteous Dr. Jenna James on Getting On. Valerie is always a few beats behind the rest, and the joke is always on her, especially when she doesn’t realize it. In attempting to play by the rules and trying so hard to come off as likable, Valerie represents the shadow that “real” artists don’t want to see. She’s a target for their self-hatred and a mirror for their corruption.
Naturally, The Comeback found an immediate and enduring gay audience. Kudrow is essentially playing a person in the closet, binding herself to deliver the persona she thinks the world will want.
When The Comeback first aired, it was in a nascent era of reality TV, before it became the norm for middle-aged women to play parodies of themselves—with or without self-awareness. Kudrow would be nominated for an Emmy for the role, but HBO still didn’t understand what it had, and the show was canceled after one season.
And then, over the next nine years, 30 Rock’s Jenna Maroney, Weeds’ Nancy Botwin, Veep’s Selina Myers, Enlightened’s Amy Jellicoe, and Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana would dare viewers to watch as they bombed their own lives. Prestige television was also reaching its apogee, and the age of “dark” television had become inescapable. In the fall of 2014, it was time for Valerie Cherish to return, and this time, she’d turn the camera on HBO itself.
For the show’s spectacular second season, a comeback itself, the documentary crew returned as Valerie starred in a fictional, self-serious HBO series from Room & Bored creator Paulie G., a misogynist hack now considered an auteur. This new show, Seeing Red, would retell the making of Room & Bored in the gritty style that academy voters love, depicting Paulie G.’s psychological torture at the hands of faded sitcom star Mallory Church. Of course, Valerie gets the role. Now playing a version of herself, she enters the final gauntlet of degradation.
As with the second seasons of Fleabag, My Mad Fat Diary, and Enlightened, The Comeback’s return felt like a moment of synthesis, perfecting what had previously been just a thrilling experiment. Kudrow and King still put Valerie through hell, but there’s more mercy in the writing and a sense that everyone—including the audience—deserves a happy ending.
Scream 3 threw Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott onto the Hollywood set of Stab 3, a movie-within-a-movie about the murders she survived in the first Scream. This phantasmagoric descent into the past would ultimately be the medicine Sidney needed to battle Ghostface in a soundstage of her childhood bedroom. She faces her history and emerges whole. The Comeback’s second season would deliver redemption, too, but only if its heroine could see through her own hall of mirrors.
This outing goes for the jugular of self-indulgent highbrow TV. Valerie comes from an age of canned laughter and sitcom catchphrases. She doesn’t understand why, on Seeing Red, which consists largely of naked women and heroin needles, she is suddenly esteemed and taken seriously as a real actress. All she can focus on is how she’s depicted. Valerie knows that whether the project is broad or “artistic,” the rules of TV remain the same. If she doesn’t take control of the narrative by any means necessary, Paulie G. will depict her as a sexless harridan, or worse, someone who slept their way to success.
And so Valerie tries to hack her own Hunger Games, in the process detonating her personal life and marriage. Her devoted husband, Mark (Damian Young) threatens to walk out after Valerie turns their home into a set for Seeing Red. And her ride-or-die Mickey may be dying of cancer, his nosebleeds killing the vibe of her red carpet arrival. But Valerie has finally scored an Emmy nomination and, for the first time in decades, the love of the public. She can’t stop now, even if, when she wins her prize, she may really be alone on that stage.
The final episode brings her in contact with her Bored co-star, Juna (Malin Akerman), who feels that Valerie allowed Seeing Red to portray her as a fame-hungry bimbo. Valerie, ever the lone Lilith on the Hollywood lot, never considered feminist solidarity as an option. Stumbling over an apology, Kudrow reveals all that Valerie doesn’t have the words to say: that she’s in the fight of her life, that in an endless deluge of abuse, she didn’t know she could speak out.
In the final minutes of The Comeback, Valerie must make a choice: remain in the labyrinth or step into the light of reality. In a departure worthy of Dorothy to Oz, Valerie leaves behind the documentary cameras—the framing device of the series—and enters the real world. Michael Patrick King had taken Carrie Bradshaw to Paris and back, and was game to deliver another arrival worthy of Old Hollywood. Ironically, as Valerie is finally released from her Norma Desmond delusion, she looks more glamorous, more like a movie star, than ever.
Valerie races to an ailing Mickey, and, in the harsh overhead lighting of his hospital room, emerges as a sun, incandescent and selflessly radiant. Fleabag and I May Destroy You would close their sagas on similar moments of clarity, in which the protagonist would finally leave behind her coping mechanism. This was a catharsis that only the best series finale could deliver, a payoff after years of pain on par with Six Feet Under’s epic death montage.
Notably, The Comeback doesn’t end with Valerie disavowing the industry. With Mark in hand, she readies herself for Emmy parties and more shows—armed with sobriety, or, at least, humility. The Comeback suggests that this compromise is perhaps the best any of us can hope for: not moral purity, but balance.
Now that the world has become a personalized panopticon for our own self-humiliation, each of us is a Valerie Cherish more embarrassing than Valerie Cherish herself. If we are to take The Comeback as a codex for the survival of consciousness in the surveillance state, its final hour leaves us with optimism. Its message: there is humanity to be found among the mannequins. Privacy may be sold, dignity wasted, but loyalty—to one’s self, and to the people that matter—travels at frequencies which cameras cannot capture.
Inevitably, in the decade since Valerie departed, TV’s golden age crashed: streaming and strikes have led to a boom-and-bust of outsize budgets and the self-cannibalization of stale intellectual properties. Meanwhile, reality TV producers settle more lawsuits every year to cover up for the terror their contestants are subject to, and the Emmys feel more out of touch than ever.
Like an avenging angel, Valerie Cherish must return—a desire shared by Kudrow and King, it should be noted. Now that everyone has made themselves a false celebrity, the first messiah of documentary delusion will rise again and shine the mirror on the masses. Only Valerie can bring redemption to a distorted reality.
