Like the mythical city of Brigadoon, Lisa Kudrow\u2019s \u201cThe Comeback\u201d has returned to television after many years away, with the difference that time has not stood still for its inhabitants, older in a changing world that values them less and which they navigate with less assurance.<\/p>\n
Kudrow, who created and writes the series with Michael Patrick King, was in her youth a player in the twilight of network-dominated television, cast in a smart, influential show with wide, multigenerational appeal; in a quantitative sense, at least, everything would be downhill from there, as the medium transformed and transformed again. \u201cThe Comeback\u201d premiered in 2005, just a year after the end of \u201cFriends\u201d<\/a>; the first season addressed the rise of reality TV, and the next season<\/a>, in 2014, riffed on dark, streaming \u201cprestige\u201d television.<\/p>\n The new (and final) season, which is both timely and speculative, addresses the impact of artificial intelligence on the medium and the industry, hinting at a dystopian future; this gives it a moral, even political component, not to say a sense of urgency. Not surprisingly, \u201cThe Comeback,\u201d as a thing made by humans, comes down firmly on their side \u2014 it\u2019s a manifesto at times \u2014 even as it acknowledges, uncomfortably, that computer-produced content might be \u201cgood enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Once again, Kudrow plays Valerie Cherish, who, at 60 \u2014 the phrase \u201cof a certain age\u201d repeats throughout the series \u2014 still qualifies as a working actor. But she\u2019s been pushed into the further reaches of the profession: Her two-season cozy mystery series, \u201cMrs. Hatt\u201d (\u201cpart-time gardener, solves crime, husband is an ex-police chief\u201d), is on no one\u2019s radar but her own, having shown on Epix. A day\u2019s work on a \u201cno-budget\u201d film is even less rewarding than she had imagined; she lasted all of two episodes on \u201cThe Traitors.\u201d<\/a> Paddling hard to stay current, to improve her brand, she bumbles through a podcast, \u201cCherish the Time,\u201d without any idea what to do with that time; employs a social media person, Patience (Ella Stiller), with no discernible impact; and posts pictures of herself holding products in hopes of \u201cfuture collabs.\u201d<\/p>\n Still, she is not poor. Valerie and husband Mark (Damian Young), have moved from Brentwood to a condominium with a view in the (real life) Sierra Towers, overlooking the Sunset Strip, opening the latest \u201cnew chapter\u201d in their lives, though just what that chapter for them is hard to say. Mark has lost his job in finance \u2014 \u201cYou told a joke at work at a time when jokes were illegal,\u201d Valerie says, trying to cheer him, \u201cno one cares now\u201d \u2014 but left on a golden parachute; now he builds his day around pickleball. A potential role in a reality show, \u201cFinance Dudes,\u201d isn\u2019t working out to anyone\u2019s satisfaction. He\u2019s on the verge of a three-quarter-life crisis.<\/p>\n When her self-promoting manager\/publicist Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) comes to her waving an offer for a new series, for a new network, in which she\u2019ll star, Valerie is more than intrigued, if taken aback when he tells her that it\u2019s being written by AI. (He isn\u2019t supposed to know.) Network head Brandon (Andrew Scott, as blandly discomfiting as his Moriarty on \u201cSherlock\u201d) assures her that it is \u201cwithin the Writers Guild agreement,\u201d but that it is also a secret \u2014 which will account for a lot of comedy going forward, secrets and lies being the very stuff of the form. \u201cAI is really extraordinary,\u201d he tells Valerie. \u201cAfter all, it picked you.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s also created a wholly generic multicamera sitcom, \u201cHow\u2019s That?,\u201d in which Valerie\u2019s character, Beth, as she describes it, \u201cruns a cute, charming old New England B&B with the help of her hunk nephew, Bo \u2014 so Beth and Bo, B&B.\u201d (\u201cViewers want a break from the complicated confusing storylines of all these dark streaming shows,\u201d says a network exec.) Her eager supporting cast has no idea that the series is being written by anything other than its human faces, unhappily married couple Josh (John Early) and Mary (Abbi Jacobson). Josh, who thinks of himself as \u201cthe voice of women of a certain age,\u201d is precious about the jokes he manages to get into the script; Mary couldn\u2019t care less. Untalented writing assistant Marco (Tony Macht) only wants \u201cto get, like, a really nice house.\u201d The AI, meanwhile, is personified to the cast and crew, who know nothing about it, as someone named \u201cAl,\u201d who \u201cworks remotely.\u201d<\/p>\n One by one, the old company is introduced into the new season, Valerie finds Jane (Laura Silverman), her former documentarian, working as a cashier at Trader Joe\u2019s, having tired of scuffling as a filmmaker, \u201cbegging people to care about the things that I cared about.\u201d When Valerie lets it slip that her new series is AI-generated \u2014 \u201cbut don\u2019t tell anyone \u2018cause that\u2019s a secret\u201d \u2014 Jane is inspired to pick up her camera again. Lance Barber will eventually rejoin as screenwriter Paulie G., Valerie\u2019s old nemesis. Robert Michael Morris, who played Mickey, Valerie\u2019s hairdresser and best friend, in earlier seasons, passed away in 2017; Jack O\u2019Brien, as Tommy, occupies a version of that space here.<\/p>\n Valerie may be only moderately successful, but she isn\u2019t a hack. She has an Emmy for \u201cSeeing Red,\u201d the drama at the center of Season 2. She pushes back against the costumer (Benito Skinner) who wants to put her in a caftan. She knows her craft and is nominally proud of belonging to a union. She\u2019s not a diva, but she has her pride. And that she is loyal, even when it does her no good, makes her easy to like. Thrust half-wittingly onto this cutting edge \u2014 being the first in an AI comedy, Mark tells her, \u201cis like saying, \u2018I was the first one to eat an arm in the Donner Party\u2019\u201d \u2014 she is wholly sympathetic, and, eventually, as things bend toward horror in a last-act revelation, a hero.<\/p>\n Though the subject is serious, the approach this time is light and farcical. Partially abandoning the documentary aesthetic of its predecessors \u2014 the first season had the look of amateur video, and the second of guerrilla filmmaking \u2014 much of this season is shot as a conventional, non-meta television show, allowing us access to private conversations and meetings without having to account for Jane and her crew, or requiring the players to act as if they\u2019re being watched. Paradoxically, without pretending to reality, it makes some things more real.<\/p>\n Playing himself, director James Burrows, whom Valerie convinces to helm her pilot, notes that the jokes AI writes might come fast but are never better than obvious. \u201cSurprising only comes from a group of writers huddled in a corner beating themselves up to beat out a better show,\u201d he says. And just as Valerie is not a character an algorithm could produce, Kudrow is not an actor a machine could ever imagine. She\u2019s no Tilly Norwood,<\/a> or Tilly Norwood at 60, or Tilly Norwood with quirks applied. There\u2019s no one like her\u2014 other than her \u2014 for the learning machines to scrape.<\/p>\n You should never settle for \u201cgood enough\u201d when better, or best, is available. But that choice is on you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like the mythical city of Brigadoon, Lisa Kudrow\u2019s \u201cThe Comeback\u201d has returned to television after many years away,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":398430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[265],"tags":[291,5154,18,117,4644,19,17,68420,181120,57616,9936,27017,38560,24868,1238,1651,1093,128,181119,80],"class_list":["post-398429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-ai","tag-comeback","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-husband","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-jane","tag-joke","tag-lisa-kudrow","tag-one","tag-season","tag-secret","tag-series","tag-television","tag-thing","tag-time","tag-tv","tag-valerie-cherish","tag-work"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116273841939252590","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/398430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}