How ‘The Comeback’ Staged The Perfect Comeback
A super-meta, super-prescient skewering of the showbiz world, and in particular, the relatively primitive phenomena of celebrity reality TV, “The Comeback” looked destined for the status of one-season wonder when HBO pulled the plug in 2005. “I was aware that it was mainly straight, white guys who couldn’t watch it,” its star Lisa Kudrow later acknowledged, perhaps explaining how douchebro counterpart “Entourage” — whose ratings it often matched — was allowed to run for eight (plus a truly loathsome film).
Thankfully, after a nine-year period in which the show had been reevaluated as a cult classic, Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King were afforded the opportunity to reintroduce their glorious comic creation, the egotistical yet strangely sympathetic enigma that is Valerie Cherish for a second season. That hurrah ran beginning November 9, 2014, and inspired the very opposite response to her well-worn catchphrase, “I don’t want to see that.”
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We’d last seen faded sitcom star Cherish agreeing to film a second season of the fly-on-the-wall show that had garnered much more interest than her hackneyed latest comedy ‘Room and Bored.’ The opening reintroduction, where she bosses around a makeshift crew of film students for a new reality series intended to wow Andy Cohen, immediately proves she still has a near-pathological addiction to the spotlight. “Guys, gotta have the camera on me,” she utters in her extremely telling first words.
A quick glimpse of showreel footage amassed from the intervening years – a guest spot on a “CSI”-esque procedural, lead in a corny film school horror, calamitous meltdown on “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” – also suggests foregoing every inch of privacy hasn’t exactly paid off, either. Even her redhead product range (tagline: ‘Cherish your hair’) bombed. “Oh, we’ve got a whole warehouse full,” remarks wonderfully flamboyant hair stylist/confidante Mickey (Robert Michael Morris) in one of many scene-stealing asides. “Can’t give it away.”
Valerie’s career looks set for another blow when news emerges Paulie G (Lance Barber), the cretinous producer who once made her life hell, has a new self-absorbed HBO dramedy, ‘Seeing Red,’ fictionalizing his experiences on ‘Room and Bored.’ For the narcissistic monster at its heart is a flame-haired actress coincidentally named Mallory Church. However, after intending to give execs a piece of her mind, Valerie ends up pipping dozens of auditionees to land the role herself.
If that wasn’t meta enough, then Valerie also railroads Jane (Laura Silverman), her old producer who’s since won an Oscar for a short about lesbians in the Holocaust, into abandoning her off-the-grid new life for another companion doc. It’s a reunion which will help catapult Valerie’s professional life into new highs, but send her personal hurtling into emotionally devastating lows.
Indeed, while Hollywood satire is still very much the show’s forte, its second season also delves much deeper into Valerie’s marriage. Heroically patient first time around, Mark (Damian Young) is continually pushed here to breaking point by his wife’s relentless quest for fame/relevance/acceptance: the discovery she’s turned up to their ‘private’ make-or-break dinner wearing a wire, for example, resulting in an agonizingly raw, secret-spilling bust-up – ironically captured by TMZ – far more uncomfortable to watch than any of the show’s cringe comedy. “Is there any part of you that’s real?” Mark asks, a gut-punching question which briefly suggests their relationship is beyond repair.
Admittedly, Mark isn’t exactly faultless. There are clearly times when he feels emasculated by his wife’s success: see how he deflates her enthusiasm over the largely positive reviews for ‘Seeing Red.’ Then there’s the bizarre outburst in which he blames Valerie for the suicide of their apartment complex tenant, one of many non-sequiturs which broadens their chaotic world. And despite his apparent disdain for celebrity, he turns into a besotted fanboy whenever in the vicinity of Seth Rogen (charm personified playing himself).
Still, he appears saintlike compared to the show’s most dominant male figure. Paulie G may have substituted smack for vaping. Yet he remains a simmering ball of passive aggression, resentment, and self-loathing who gleefully assassinates Valerie’s character – and continues to subject her to demeaning behavior – through the trojan horse of prestige TV. Three years before the #MeToo movement started to gather pace, “The Comeback” once again put its head above the parapet in calling out the rampant misogyny within the entertainment industry.
If all this sounds like one of those heavy dramedies Valerie pithily describes as “comedy without the laughs,” then “The Comeback” still boasts plenty of jokes, from the wryest observations to the kind of toilet humor you’d expect from an early ‘00s grossout movie. After all, this is a show which has Brad Goreski slipping face first into a driveway covered in fecal water.
And although her behavior is still often terribly misjudged, Valerie also displays a stronger sense of empathy, whether comforting tearful ex-colleague in the midst of a supermarket breakdown or helping immature nephew Tyler (Mark L. Young) get an industry leg-up despite an overwhelming lack of gratitude or talent beyond “Jackass”-style stunts.
Most significantly, she repeatedly prioritizes Mickey’s health over her career, culminating in a remarkably affecting finale which deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under.” Indeed, on hearing the hairdresser has been taken seriously ill, Valerie promptly leaves the Emmys – a ceremony expected to triumphantly crown her comeback – and heads for Cedars-Sinai.
It’s a remarkable sign of growth captured not by Jane’s invasive reality TV crew, but in an ingenious stylistic choice, HBO’s more cinematic aesthetic. This is the first time we see Valerie without a camera lens pointed at her. She’s exposed, totally alone, and on the verge of losing her rock, and in a career-best performance, Kudrow says more in her near-wordless cab ride than most actors would with a thousand monologues.
Thankfully, Mickey survives the scare, and alongside the previously estranged Mark, Valerie learns of her awards victory on a hospital room TV, with her Disney princess-esque ballgown and subsequent walk off into the sunset (aka the Emmys after-party) only adding to the fairytale vibes. Never once compromising its ideals nor ever simplifying its encyclopedic knowledge of the world it inhabited, it‘s the kind of ending both its leading lady and the show itself truly earned.
“The Comeback” is now streaming on Max.
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