Dispatch • Lisa Kudrow, Michael Patrick King, and the 'The Comeback' Creative Team Say Goodbye to Valerie Cherish

The final scene of The Comeback's series finale begins in black and white. Jane's (Laura Silverman) camera holds the image there until Valerie starts sharing her truth, and color slowly seeps into the world around her. It’s a meaningful shift that gently corrects the record, insisting, after three seasons over 21 years, that viewers never saw Valerie fully until now.

That The Comeback found its way to such an ending at all is its own kind of story. Kudrow and Michael Patrick King created The Comeback, which premiered on HBO in 2005 as a satire about Valerie Cherish, a former sitcom star trying to claw her way back into relevance while a reality show films the attempt. It returned in 2014 with an even sharper idea: Valerie joins a prestige drama that turns her own humiliation into art, earning Kudrow an Emmy nomination.

The third and final season, arriving more than a decade after that, puts Valerie in her most precarious position yet: she leads How’s That?!, the first multi-camera sitcom largely written by AI, and tries to navigate a corner of the industry trying to outsource creativity. Where Season 1 set her against reality TV and Season 2 against the prestige drama built around her humiliation, Season 3 sets her against a machine that tries imitating creativity without caring who created it. The tension is familiar—will Valerie draw a line, or find a way to carry on?—but after more than two decades, The Comeback understands the answer was never simple.

On May 27, HBO hosted a For Your Consideration (FYC) event in Hollywood that gave the cast and creative team a chance to reflect on their journey together. Veteran entertainment journalist Jim Halterman moderated a panel with Kudrow, King, Jack O’Brien, Damian Young, Laura Silverman, and Dan Bucatinsky. The warm applause throughout felt like recognition: of the work, and years it took to assemble Valerie’s singular world.

The idea for this season took a decade to find. King described years of lunches with Kudrow where the conversation returned to Valerie without resolution. “We came up with Chicago, Valerie in Chicago, five years ago, but we knew it wasn’t a big enough idea,” he said. The right one arrived as they were leaving one of those lunches: Valerie cast in an AI-written sitcom. “Both Lisa and I felt it was a big enough machine—no pun intended—to actually do the show on,” King said. Kudrow, characteristically, sharpened the premise to its essence. “It was a bad enough idea for Valerie to throw herself into,” she mused.

Season 3 gives everyone room to change, and the writing room found its pleasure in that evolution. King described this as the deepest pleasure of working in television. “The great extravagance of being able to do a series is the evolution of a character,” he said. “If your intention is to have everybody grow, you just start looking at the actors and think they can do everything, so let’s give them everything to do.”

For Bucatinsky, that meant following his character Billy Stanton toward the “butterfly he believes himself to be," as Bucatinsky put it. Season 3 makes Billy Valerie's producing partner and an executive producer on How's That?!, a long-overdue promotion for someone who spent two decades asking, in Bucatinsky's words, "when is it my turn?" He described Billy's arc as a coming-out story, not an easy one and not one that went smoothly, tracing the distance between the passed-over figure from Season 1 and the man who finally has somewhere to go.

Young, meanwhile, spoke about playing Valerie’s husband Mark in a season that finally gives the marriage real weight. Mark finds himself on a reality show of his own: the last place imaginable for the man who spent Season 1 as Valerie’s barely-in-frame anchor. Young said his wife started crying during certain scenes. “She said, ‘That’s you, that’s you,’” he recalled. He didn’t elaborate on which moments. He didn’t need to.

Silverman, who played documentary director Jane Benson from the show’s start, spoke about how integral her character was to the final season. “I wasn’t expecting it,” she said. “I was ready to do whatever was asked of me.” Across Season 3, Jane becomes Valerie’s most sustained witness, telling Valerie in the finale’s final moments, “I feel like I’m seeing you for the first time.” When Halterman observed that Jane is, in many ways, the audience watching Valerie, Silverman agreed, then softened the idea into its most generous form. “It’s not really mine. It’s yours,” she said.

The most affecting stretch of the evening centered on Tommy, Valerie’s current hairstylist, played by O’Brien—a legendary stage director and four-time Tony Award winner making his screen acting debut. Kudrow and King brought Tommy in to fill the space left by Mickey, Valerie’s late hairdresser and closest confidant, after the death of actor Robert Michael Morris in 2017.

For anyone who once watched Valerie lean on Mickey as both protector and intimate audience, his absence in Season 3 gave the comedy a bruise. King explained the moment in Season 3 in which Tommy reaffirms to Valerie he could never replace Mickey. “We wanted Tommy to say, ‘I’m not Mickey, and everybody can relax,’” he said. The emotional onscreen moment forces a reckoning Valerie has been avoiding, bringing her to the grief she’s been circling. “Tommy’s the one that brings her to the precipice of: you’re not dealing with this, so that we can all deal with it together,” King said. “But it wasn’t enough just to do an in memoriam episode. We wanted to do a story that moved everybody forward, and to show the difference between Mickey and Tommy.”

King found O’Brien through a YouTube video of the director discussing his Broadway career. “A thought came into my mind: that’s the placebo Mickey,” King said. “He’s not an actor. He’s theatrical in an organic human way.”

When they finally sat down, King asked, almost as an afterthought, whether O’Brien could act. “What do you think I’ve been doing this entire dinner pretending you’re interesting?” O’Brien quipped. On the scene where Tommy tells Valerie she has unfinished business with Mickey, O’Brien was direct. “I stared into [Kudrow’s] face and just told the truth,” he added. “I don’t call it acting. I just called it a real honor.”

King, returning to the finale, elaborated on his creative choices in the episode's parting scene. “A lot of people thought she was kind of black and white in the first season: she was annoying, or this or that,” he continued. “They didn’t see the full range, and at that moment you see a really vibrant version of Valerie, when she’s telling her truth.” It's a deceptively simple answer to the season's central question and, after three seasons, the right one.

The shift from black and white to full color arrives when Valerie shares her truth, when, as King put it, her humanity comes forward. For a show that so often asked whether people watched Valerie—used her, mocked her, or finally understood her—the image simply arrives. The show was always going to end here; it just took 21 years to find the right frame.

Kudrow, when asked how they knew the writing had arrived at the right ending, kept it brief. “When a line would come out and Michael’s eyes exploded in tears, then we knew that was right,” she said.

The Comeback spent three seasons watching an industry find new ways to tell Valerie she was almost enough, but never quite. This season, that industry even imagined television pushing aside the very people who give it shape, the writers who give it a pulse. But in the finale’s closing scene, it feels like the show’s soft rebuttal: an acknowledgement, at last, of what had been there all along. Valerie was never becoming someone else. She was stepping fully, unmistakably into view.

All three seasons of The Comeback are available to stream on HBO Max.