'The Comeback' Series Finale Completes a Bittersweet, Cynical Journey
Lisa Kudrow in 'The Comeback'
Erin Simkin/HBO
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This column contains spoilers for the May 10 series finale of The Comeback, though is The Comeback really the sort of plot-rich show that you worry about having spoiled for you?
A good finale — a good planned finale, at least — is the destination of a journey measured in years, in seasons, in episodes.
HBO’s The Comeback is a uniquely modern show insofar as Sunday’s finale was the culmination of nearly 21 years since the series’ June 5, 2005, launch. Or maybe it was the culmination of three seasons — pretty reasonable by today’s premium cable standards, but hardly epic. Or perhaps it was the culmination of 29 episodes of television, roughly the number that The Comeback star Lisa Kudrow‘s Friends would produce in its typical season, plus a month.
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I mention this because when I watched the series finale of The Comeback back in March, having binged eight screeners in a weekend, it felt like Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King had leaned too much into the “finale” aspect, aiming for a level of conclusiveness that felt needlessly tidy at best or generally unearned at worst. I accepted that maybe I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Comeback — it’s a show I liked, but never loved in the way its most passionate supporters have — and so perhaps the seemingly overly happy and resolved ending just wasn’t for me.
That’s still true, but I rewatched the episode and it struck me in a different way — a way that forced me to reflect on time and the show’s bizarre relationship to it, as well as the happy ending and how “happy” it actually was.
It’s a common joke — one that has become more common since the election of 2016 and especially since the COVID pandemic — that in our chaotic modern world, every day feels like a week, every week like a month, every month like a year. But sometimes it feels like a blink. We’re bingeing life. This is even truer in an entertainment business that has been in exhausting flux — the toll of the pandemic, of industry-wide strikes, of unprecedented media consolidation.
The third season of The Comeback has aired over only two months, but the season’s core adversarial relationship, between the grasping desperation of the creative community and the steady encroachment of AI, has only taken on an increasingly dominant role in Hollywood’s ongoing conversations. (For more on those conversations, read THR‘s AI issue, including my own column on how television has been approaching AI both onscreen and behind the scenes.)
In the Comeback finale, Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish is summoned to meet with the so-called Mt. Rushmore of television writers, scribes played by Bradley Whitford, Adam Scott and Justin Theroux. The three writers urge Valerie to use the upcoming renewal press conference for NuNet’s largely AI-written How’s That?! — a show whose success is measured in a 72-percent completion rate, rather than quality — to make a plea on behalf of their profession.
“This is not the normal TV evolution — network to cable, cable to streaming, streaming to AI. It’s not,” Whitford’s Jack Stevens says. “This is an extinction event.”
The Comeback, going back to its origins, hasn’t been a show that produced a great volume of content, but it has traced, over 21 years, an unimaginable evolution in the medium, one that has been both normal and abnormal. We have, indeed, gone from network to cable, cable to streaming, and, on the horizon, AI looms. Cable looked like an extinction event for broadcast. Streaming looked like an extinction event for cable.
But television survives. Scripted television survives, despite the fears that helped spawn The Comeback in the first place — that reality television was going to squeeze scripted programming off of the airwaves.
(The airwaves, kids, were what television used to materialize through, a magical force that was replaced by cable lines and bandwidth and finally just “the ether.” Look, I watch the technology. I don’t understand it.)
The final season of The Comeback aired over months, but it might as well have aired over years. The series run of The Comeback aired over decades, but it might as well have aired over centuries. Twenty-one years. Three seasons. Twenty-nine episodes.