Lisa Kudrow on the Series Finale of ‘The Comeback’

Reported by Vogue.

Twenty years is a long time to root for someone who doesn't know she needs rooting for. That's the particular genius of The Comeback — and, according to Vogue, Lisa Kudrow has spent two decades refusing to let anyone reduce Valerie Cherish to a punchline.

When Kudrow and writer Michael Patrick King first pitched the HBO series, the timing looked unbeatable: King had just finished the Sex and the City finale, Kudrow was walking off the Friends set after ten seasons. The show that followed — a Hollywood satire framed as raw reality-TV footage of a faded sitcom star clawing her way back — was too cynical, too meta, too ahead of the curve. HBO pulled the plug after one season in 2005. Then The Comeback quietly became a cult masterpiece, HBO revived it in 2014 for a second season, and now a third season — greenlit immediately, no hesitation — is streaming. The premise this time: Valerie agrees to headline How's That?, the first sitcom written entirely by generative AI.

The Machine in the Room

The AI storyline isn't dystopian fantasy — it's Tuesday. "Nothing in our show is science fiction at this point," Kudrow says flatly. King dreamed up the concept during the 2023 writers' strikes, when the industry's anxiety about automation stopped being hypothetical. By the season three finale, Valerie is speaking out against AI replacing human writers, which costs her the approval of a network executive (Andrew Scott) but earns her a role on the next prestige hit from a showrunner played by Bradley Whitford. Valerie Cherish survives, as Valerie Cherish does. The show also takes aim at the shrinking math of the industry: Friends ran 22-episode seasons with up to 15 writers; now the WGA minimum for a limited series is three. "The number of writing jobs just keeps getting smaller," Kudrow notes. "If we were going to make a show about AI, we had to be realistic about how many people are probably going to be replaced."

The series closes the same way it opened — Valerie in her final documentary interview, being told she's spent 20 years absorbing humiliation. Her response is genuine confusion. "I think you have to agree to be humiliated, and I never signed up." Kudrow is clear that she never played Valerie from a place of pain, either. While other actors told her they watched the show through their fingers, convinced they were witnessing a woman suffering, Kudrow kept thinking: what pain? Valerie dusts herself off. She keeps talking. Straight male executives at the original network apparently found it punishing to watch — Kudrow suspects it was uncomfortable to see a woman treated badly by men who looked like them, back when nobody was naming that dynamic out loud.

Resilient or delusional? That's always been The Comeback's most honest question — and the fact that it still doesn't have an easy answer is exactly why Valerie Cherish outlasted everyone who underestimated her.

Read the original at Vogue.