Close-Up: 'The Comeback' Co-Creator Michael Patrick King on the Final Scene With Lisa Kudrow

When Jane (Laura Silverman) comes back to film Valerie (Lisa Kudrow) one last time, she shoots Valerie the way Valerie has always wanted to be seen: as someone the form was made for.

What follows is one of the best scenes HBO’s The Comeback has ever produced. The image begins in grainy black-and-white, then eases—slowly, over the course of a few sentences—into full color. It happens not at a moment of triumph, not when Valerie wins anything, but when she simply shares the truth about herself.

Co-creator Michael Patrick King had the idea from the start. “Showing a film—an actual film—in black and white felt weirdly like Valerie was old Hollywood,” he told Scene and Unheard at a press conference on March 19. “We were actually referencing Now, Voyager.” The Bette Davis film was a favorite of Mickey (Robert Michael Morris), Valerie’s late hairdresser and closest friend—and the finale was shot at Warner Bros., where Now, Voyager was made in 1942. The history of Hollywood was quite literally underfoot.

“People saw Valerie in black and white: victim, crazy, loser, winner,” King continued. “There was no gray area. So we started with a gray film, and then brought her into color.” The shift arrives right when, as King put it, Valerie’s “humanity really starts” to come through.

The choice was also, he acknowledged, a calculated risk—and he situated it inside a pattern of storytelling gambles that define the show’s more than 20-year run. Season 1 was shot as a reality series following Valerie’s camera crew through the making of a new sitcom; Season 2 unspooled as a documentary. Season 3 mixed single-camera scenes with found footage. “At the end of Season 2, we took a risk where she left the reality cameras behind,” King said. “Here was a risk: all of a sudden we’re going to black and white.”

The episode’s title makes the same argument in a different register. Every other episode title this season carries a certain Valerie-plus-verb construction: “Valerie Gets a New Chapter,” “Valerie Faces Reality,” “Valerie Does It All,” among others. The finale’s title is even simpler. That was deliberate on King’s part. “This is just ‘Valerie Cherish,’” he said—not what happens to her, not what she gains or loses. Just her, seen at last on her own terms.

Jane, who has been filming Valerie since 2005 through the humiliations, the near-misses, the Emmy, and even the AI sitcom, tells her she has watched her spend 20 years in an industry that offered her “nothing but humiliation.” It reads as recognition, even a form of tenderness, but Valerie doesn’t take it.

“You have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up,” she explains.

To understand why that line lands as hard as it does, you have to return to the first frame Valerie ever tried to manage. The Comeback, created by Kudrow and King in 2005, follows Valerie Cherish, a sitcom actress who found fame in the ’90s on a show called I’m It! and then spent a decade losing her footing in an industry that stopped calling. When viewers first meet her, she has agreed to two things: a role on a new network sitcom called Room and Bored, and a companion reality series documenting her return to relevance.

The catch—one of many—is that she thought she was playing one of four young singles in a hip condo. She arrived on set to discover she’d been cast as their landlord aunt. In the show’s first scene, Valerie fixes herself in her kitchen and announces to Jane’s camera, with forced brightness, “This is my comeback!” She asks Jane to do it again, more excited. The performance keeps falling slightly short. From the beginning, The Comeback was about a woman trying to look like she was winning, even when she didn’t always feel that way herself.

Season 2, which aired years later in 2014, pushed further. Valerie maneuvered her way into an HBO drama about the writer who had humiliated her on Room and Bored—casting herself as a fictionalized version of herself, earning an Emmy for a role that required her to relive one of the worst professional periods of her life. She left the Season 2 finale not at the awards ceremony but at her hairdresser Mickey’s hospital bedside, watching the Emmys announce her win on a TV screen. Even recognition arrived at a remove. The industry kept handing her diminishing roles and calling them opportunities; Valerie kept trying to turn them into meaningful work.

The show’s third season, which debuted in March, returned her to a landscape even less interested in her humanity. How’s That?!, the multi-camera sitcom she signed on for at NuNet, turned out to be the first show largely written by AI. Valerie is, again, the face of something she didn’t fully choose—only this time, the machinery around her no longer needs writers, memory, or even, perhaps, her. The season’s running tension was whether Valerie, now also serving as an executive producer, would finally draw a moral line or whether, as always, she’ll find a way to simply make the best of it.

The finale opens with the best possible version of the latter. How’s That?! has gotten good enough ratings for a renewal, and NuNet chief Brandon (Andrew Scott) wants Valerie at his side for the announcement. Before she can get there, she’s intercepted by the so-called Big 3—Jack Stevens (Bradley Whitford), Ben Morrow (Justin Theroux), and Matt Wright (Adam Scott), three of the most powerful writer-producers in TV. They want Valerie to use the press conference to take a stand against AI authorship. The ask isn’t unreasonable. But Valerie’s show also employs actual humans, and she won’t put their jobs at risk to satisfy the conscience of three men who seemingly never once worried about their own.

The meeting is some of the season’s sharpest writing. The Big 3 are right about the danger of AI, but the scene keeps puncturing their righteousness with jokes and ego. The Comeback has spent 20 years conditioning us to expect Valerie to crumble (or overreach) in rooms like this. She does neither.

The press conference is where things tip for Valerie. Brandon, defending the AI-written format, says NuNet can be a home for culture-defining TV as well as shows that “don’t need genius.” “AI’s got the sitcoms,” he contends. “Easy-peasy.” Valerie responds by telling reporters about the night before, when the AI hit a “studio paywall” while taping and couldn’t write more jokes “in front of a live audience.” But a talented young writer saved the day.

Brandon isn’t pleased; he felt “ambushed” by Valerie’s anecdote out there. The scolding that follows is unsparing. How’s That?! will not get the resources Valerie wants, including a real showrunner or writing staff, and if she wants out, an AI version of her is already waiting in the wings to replace her on the show. “If this isn’t working for you, you don’t have to do Season 2,” Brandon says.

Valerie, of course, refuses to let that doomsday statement be the end of her story. Kudrow and King give Valerie something gentler than pure vindication: Jack, so moved watching a How’s That?! taping, develops a new drama for her called Judge’s Table, playing Eleanor Judge, a federal court judge with a “certain gravitas” and “strong moral compass” who gives up her legal career to pursue her “true passion” of being a chef.

In the finale’s closing scene, Valerie’s response to Jane isn’t defiant so much as clarifying. The image coming into color at that moment isn’t a metaphor for Valerie finally winning. It’s a correction: a visual argument that the gray film was never the accurate one.

As King suggested, the color begins to enter when Valerie’s humanity comes forward, when she is essentially asking to be seen not as a punchline or a category, but as a person. She wasn’t a victim; she was a person, all along, refusing to let the camera become the final authority on who she was. “We wanted to make sure people saw Valerie in a different way at the end and could see a little bit of how Valerie sees herself,” King said.

The scene ends with a callback to the show’s first-ever scene. After Valerie discusses Judge’s Table and Jane says how “proud” she is—“I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time,” Jane offers—Valerie tells Jane she needs to “sound more excited” before stepping out of the frame, only to step back in again to explain to us what a “callback” is. (It’s a “sitcom writing term, when you call something back that happened before, for a laugh,” she explains.)

More than two decades of TV, and Valerie Cherish still needs you to know she got it, still needs the last word. The camera is finally, at the end, a friend—and she uses it exactly the way she always wanted to: to perform, yes, but also to be seen fully.

All episodes of The Comeback are now available to stream on HBO Max.