Streaming on:<\/strong> HBO Max \/ SKY <\/span><\/p>\n Lisa Kudrow slips into Valerie Cherish like she\u2019s a second skin. It\u2019s a full-on brain transplant of a performance, Kudrow out of the picture, Cherish taking over, desperation in human form, forever smiling, forever disguising \u2014 badly \u2014 the pain within. It\u2019s a masterclass in character work, every strained intonation, every psychologically wounded facial flicker, every over-compensatory gesture, and at this point it is practically Kudrow\u2019s life\u2019s work. First arriving in 2005, Valerie has returned every decade to awkwardly find her place in an ever-evolving \u2014 or devolving \u2014 media landscape, and while she is worlds apart from Kudrow, make no mistake: this is personal. Valerie is Kudrow\u2019s middle name. Literally. It\u2019s her middle name. Lisa Valerie Kudrow. She is not Valerie Cherish. But Valerie Cherish is her.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n From the germ of an idea by Kudrow, agog at the bizarre blossoming of reality television and the shameless egos populating it, she and Michael Patrick King birthed the character in 2004, when Friends<\/em> and Sex And The City<\/em> (much of the latter written and directed by King) ended. Valerie came to us fully formed, and seemed more obviously connected to Kudrow\u2019s early-1990s training with improv sketch-group The Groundlings than Phoebe from Friends<\/em> (on which she was not a writer) did \u2014 it was as if her own (co-) creation was busting to be born. Hungry for stardom and starving for the spotlight, Valerie is excruciatingly performative, a mess of good intentions and horrendous decisions, perpetually in denial as she suffers an endless succession of indignities, some self-inflicted. Often cajoled into debasing herself to further her career, she believes the key to survival, alongside her relentless tenacity, is to project constant chipperness. But she is constantly cracking. The eyes tell the truth, regardless of the Chesire Cat grin.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n The exceptional first two seasons found an at first down-on-her-luck Valerie climbing back up the ladder while simultaneously starring in reality shows about her return to television, and triumphing: Season 2 ended with her winning an Emmy, and off screen, Kudrow was nominated too, as she was for Season 1, and will undoubtedly be again for 2026\u2019s third and final season. Now, Valerie is starring in the world\u2019s first sitcom (the perfectly titled \u2018How\u2019s That?!\u2019) written by AI, despite superficially protesting against such a thing in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. Throughout the eight episodes, Kudrow and King show us that Valerie has changed. She has learned some lessons. She has accrued more confidence. Not quite the walking carpet she has been in the past, she\u2019s a little more savvy, has a little more integrity, a little more self-respect \u2014 and more bite, when she needs it. Twenty-one years older than when we first met her, you\u2019d hope that would be the case. We all grow. Yet many of our hopes and dreams, our fears and self-loathing, remain, as is very much the case with Valerie Cherish, who still suffers from feverish self-preservation, still desperate for affirmation, validation, respect and, now, social collabs with Nivea. And, as cruel as The Comeback<\/em> can be to Valerie, King and Kudrow write and perform her so compassionately, so delicately. It\u2019s hard to think of another comedy show that tickles the funny bone while tugging at the heartstrings in the same moment<\/em>.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Says goodbye to the show guns blazing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n Fame is still the game for Valerie, obsessed with relevance, although the commentary on reality TV is less pronounced, as the format has become so commonplace itself: cameras (and phone cameras) are everywhere now in The Comeback<\/em>, mostly without question. At one point, Valerie is followed by her own behind-the-scenes crew (led, as ever, by Laura Silverman\u2019s crusading documentarian Jane) into her manager\u2019s (Dan Bucatinksy\u2019s increasingly ghoulish Billy) office, where she is ambushed into taking part in some professional couples-therapy, the therapist armed with his own crew for a TV pilot \u2014 the result is like a Mexican standoff, but with cameras instead of guns.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Also, this time, everyone<\/em> is desperate. Valerie\u2019s husband Mark (Damian Young), usually her rock, her voice of reason, has lost his high-powered finance job and now, in his late middle-age, is clinging onto being cool (at least his idea of it), pathetically excited about his new Soho House membership and his stylishly oversized spectacles, and attempting his own reality-TV career by starring in a cretinous creation called \u2018Finance Dudes\u2019. Billy, meanwhile, having anointed himself Valerie\u2019s producing partner, is more interested in his own burgeoning industry-sway and status. Some of what goes on with these two characters in particular is perhaps a smidge too broad. Yes, this is the show in which Valerie once \u2014 iconically! \u2014 puked all over a studio floor while dressed as a giant cupcake \u2014 but a couple of the excesses of Season 3 do lessen the frisson of reality the show has somehow always retained.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Still, Mark and Billy\u2019s arcs are a keen comment on the unfortunate state of things in 2026, where so many people are fighting for their own cachet, however egotistical their goals may be. Meanwhile, the institutions and corporations around them become ever-more controlling, here signified by the unscrupulous NuNet, led by Andrew Scott\u2019s lizardy moral-abyss of a network exec, Brandon; a press conference, in which only \u201cfriends\u201d of the network (and influencers) are invited to attend, says as much about contemporary politics as it does showbiz.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Genuine despair really does underpin this final season, which offers a compassionate and sad perspective on the havoc that generative AI is beginning to wreak, and the livelihoods that will be lost because of it. Valerie may not be aggressively opposed to it at the start, more concerned with how she might be judged by her peers than with the actual ramifications of it all \u2014 when stalwart sitcom-director Jimmy Burrows, returning to The Comeback<\/em> once more to play himself, lobs some helpful truth-bombs at her, she immediately hurtles into denial. Writers, he tells her, turn their pain into jokes: \u201cThose broken, beautiful souls are what makes something great.\u201d She may well know that that\u2019s true, but doesn\u2019t want to hear it, doesn\u2019t want her dream derailed, so clings onto a questionable second opinion. She soon sees, though, how quickly things collapse without actual human writers on the job.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n If this all sounds a little on the nose, well, it is a little on the nose. Kudrow and King are not in the mood to beat around the bush. The Comeback<\/em> has always worshipped at the altar of good television, and the current threat has them saying goodbye to the show guns blazing. You certainly can\u2019t quibble with their passion, but it does somewhat overwhelm the final few episodes, and as The Comeback<\/em> reaches its conclusion, the comedy takes a bit of a backseat. Because for Kudrow and King, this is no laughing matter. Nevertheless, even with fewer yuks it is effective, Valerie pushed and pulled about by various powerful forces, her really quite complex quandary challenging her own sense of integrity, and watching Kudrow portray the character with such gusto is rewarding.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n And for the most part, her and King\u2019s heart-on-sleeve approach pays off. The early throughline about Valerie\u2019s old friend and hairstylist Mickey, played by Robert Michael Morris, who died in 2017, is hugely touching. Valerie has been hit hard by Mickey\u2019s death, just as Kudrow and King were by Morris\u2019, and you can feel the loss and heartbreak whenever he is invoked. The sequence here in which Valerie scatters Mickey\u2019s ashes from the roof of a soundstage is a stirring tribute to the character and the actor.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n Such honesty, the blurring of the lines, the sense of reality, has always been key to The Comeback<\/em> \u2014 it\u2019s been about reality from the start, about reality as a constructed concept, and about genuineness. As such, it is cringey and compassionate, nuanced and broad, sincere and slapstick, all thrown in at once to reflect the messy chaos of Valerie Cherish, and of all of us.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n The Comeback\u2019s final season is an open-hearted valedictory send-off for Valerie Cherish, stumbling into the sunset as she goes. Despite a bit more bluntness than before, Kudrow and King give it everything they\u2019ve got, capping an exquisite series of television. There\u2019s never been anything quite like it.<\/p>\n Cast as the lead in a new sitcom written by AI, actor Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) finds herself becoming the figurehead for a whole new television landscape\u2026 for better or worse. Streaming on: HBO Max \/ SKYEpisodes viewed: 8 of 8 Lisa Kudrow slips into Valerie Cherish like she\u2019s a second skin. It\u2019s a full-on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8692,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-47"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Episodes viewed:<\/strong> 8 of 8<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/the-comeback-season-3.jpg\")
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