Lisa Kudrow Brings Back Valerie Cherish for The Comeback Season 3

Twenty-one years after Valerie Cherish first declared "This is my comeback" on HBO, Lisa Kudrow closed that chapter for good today as the third and final season of The Comeback premiered on March 22.

The series, which Kudrow co-created with Michael Patrick King in 2004 following a lunch meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel, has traced an arc as improbable as its fictional protagonist. Season 1 debuted in 2005, one year after Friends ended, and sent up reality television by following Valerie, a faded sitcom actress, through the humiliations of landing a role on a show called Room and Bored, being relegated to playing Aunt Sassy in a tracksuit, and eventually vomiting while wearing a cupcake costume. HBO canceled the series after that initial run, but fans, as King recalled, "quietly multiplied," with a "very big swell in New York" eventually persuading the network to revive it. Season 2, arriving in 2014, turned its satirical lens on cable television's toxic auteur era, drawing comparisons to figures like Matthew Weiner and Louis C.K. and skewering what critics called "sexposition" in dramas like Game of Thrones. New York Times critic James Poniewozik called Season 2 "a masterpiece," writing that its "multilayered production was laser-targeted at showbiz misogyny, and Kudrow's performance was devastating."

Season 3 updates the target to artificial intelligence. Kudrow said it "really had to be an idea like the AI thing" for her to return after more than a decade away, comparing AI's threat to the scripted television industry to the reality-TV explosion that defined Season 1's moment. She described Valerie's confrontation with the technology as her "ultimate battle." King framed the show's through line more broadly: "I think it's a cautionary tale, for me, to be careful about chasing the spotlight. Hollywood's just a great circus arena because so many people want to be in the spotlight." One sequence in the new season illustrates the point with precision: Valerie brings her social media curator to a WGA strike and grows flustered when a picketer's sign obstructs her best camera angle.

Kudrow confirmed the finality plainly in an NPR interview: "Now it's a trilogy. It's a whole piece, you know, and it feels more intentional. It's 20 years of looking at the television landscape."

The season carries a personal dimension. At a red-carpet premiere on March 19 at The Wallis Center in Beverly Hills, Kudrow, 62, arrived with her husband Michel Stern, 67, and their son Julian Murray Stern, 27. Julian has a recurring role in Season 3, marking his HBO debut. A USC graduate from the class of 2021, he wrapped his first TV movie, Doomed, in 2022 before joining his mother on set. The Season 3 cast also includes Zane Phillips, Brittany O'Grady, Matt Cook, Tim Bagley, and Barry Shabaka Henley.

Poniewozik, writing in the Times on January 1, had not yet screened the new season but captured its weight succinctly: "'The Comeback' may be the most aptly titled comedy on TV; it premieres, dazzles, then takes about a decade to recede from memory before, well, coming back." He added, "Let's hope the third time's a charm.