Logo text

This column contains spoilers for the May 10 series finale of The Comeback, though is The Comeback really the sort of plot-rich show that you worry about having spoiled for you?

A good finale — a good planned finale, at least — is the destination of a journey measured in years, in seasons, in episodes.

HBO’s The Comeback is a uniquely modern show insofar as Sunday’s finale was the culmination of nearly 21 years since the series’ June 5, 2005, launch. Or maybe it was the culmination of three seasons — pretty reasonable by today’s premium cable standards, but hardly epic. Or perhaps it was the culmination of 29 episodes of television, roughly the number that The Comeback star Lisa Kudrow‘s Friends would produce in its typical season, plus a month.

I mention this because when I watched the series finale of The Comeback back in March, having binged eight screeners in a weekend, it felt like Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King had leaned too much into the “finale” aspect, aiming for a level of conclusiveness that felt needlessly tidy at best or generally unearned at worst. I accepted that maybe I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Comeback — it’s a show I liked, but never loved in the way its most passionate supporters have — and so perhaps the seemingly overly happy and resolved ending just wasn’t for me.

That’s still true, but I rewatched the episode and it struck me in a different way — a way that forced me to reflect on time and the show’s bizarre relationship to it, as well as the happy ending and how “happy” it actually was.

It’s a common joke — one that has become more common since the election of 2016 and especially since the COVID pandemic — that in our chaotic modern world, every day feels like a week, every week like a month, every month like a year. But sometimes it feels like a blink. We’re bingeing life. This is even truer in an entertainment business that has been in exhausting flux — the toll of the pandemic, of industry-wide strikes, of unprecedented media consolidation.

The third season of The Comeback has aired over only two months, but the season’s core adversarial relationship, between the grasping desperation of the creative community and the steady encroachment of AI, has only taken on an increasingly dominant role in Hollywood’s ongoing conversations. (For more on those conversations, read THR‘s AI issue, including my own column on how television has been approaching AI both on-screen and behind the scenes.)

In the Comeback finale, Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish is summoned to meet with the so-called Mt. Rushmore of television writers, scribes played by Bradley Whitford, Adam Scott and Justin Theroux. The three writers urge Valerie to use the upcoming renewal press conference for NuNet’s largely AI-written How’s That?! — a show whose success is measured in a 72-percent completion rate, rather than quality — to make a plea on behalf of their profession.

“This is not the normal TV evolution — network to cable, cable to streaming, streaming to AI. It’s not.” Whitford’s Jack Stevens says. “This is an extinction event.”

The Comeback, going back to its origins, hasn’t been a show that produced a great volume of content, but it has traced, over 21 years, an unimaginable evolution in the medium, one that has been both normal and abnormal. We have, indeed, gone from network to cable, cable to streaming, and, on the horizon, AI looms. Cable looked like an extinction event for broadcast. Streaming looked like an extinction event for cable.

But television survives. Scripted television survives, despite the fears that helped spawn The Comeback in the first place — that reality television was going to squeeze scripted programming off of the airwaves.

(The airwaves, kids, were what television used to materialize through, a magical force that was replaced by cable lines and bandwidth and finally just “the ether.” Look, I watch the technology. I don’t understand it.)

The final season of The Comeback aired over months, but it might as well have aired over years. The series run of The Comeback aired over decades, but it might as well have aired over centuries. Twenty-one years. Three seasons. Twenty-nine episodes. They’re eons in TV time.

The Comeback has always been a very cynical show, but when it comes to the idea that AI is going to be the extinction event for creativity as we know it, the final season wasn’t quite optimistic, but it was definitely pragmatic. Or at least it put on a happy face.

The season’s harshest critique wasn’t directed at nerds in Silicon Valley writing programs that develop “creativity” through theft, nor at the billionaires fronting those endeavors, uninterested in the impact on the environment or the widest swath of the workforce. That’s what AMC’s The Audacity is trying to do. That’s what Hacks tried to do this very week in “Quik Scribbl,” an episode I thought was shockingly inept, a series of superficially dogmatic observations that somebody forgot to sprinkle with punchlines.

No, The Comeback pointed its most sneering contempt at Andrew Scott’s marvelously squirmy Brandon Wallick, a studio executive who insists, in the finale, that he only wants AI to replace the writers on sitcoms, not prestige dramas that require actual geniuses, like the Mt. Rushmore writers. AI can have sitcoms, right?

Brandon, who comes across like an amalgamation of a dozen top-level execs I’ve spoken to over the past 25 years, isn’t evil. He’s just bent on self-preservation. “My job is to move television forward,” he says.

Valerie responds by evoking Pastor Martin Niemöller, somebody she definitely has never heard of. She says: “Good luck keeping your job. I’m glad I at least said something. Cuz it’s like that thing, that saying, you know. When they came for the writers, you said, ‘Okay.’ When they came for the actors, you said, ‘Sure!’ And when they come for you, there won’t be anybody left to say, ‘Okay, sure.'”

Sounds bleak, right?

But that wasn’t really the tone of the finale. Valerie’s AI-written sitcom may be puerile garbage, but we see in the episode that it’s still capable of building an on-set family of actors and craftspeople, still capable of inspiring at least one assistant to move in the direction of becoming a writer himself, still capable of delighting a human studio audience. And when Whitford’s Jack Stevens comes to the set, there’s still enough magic for him to remember his own experiences as a baby scribe on multi-cam sitcoms.

The magic still remains, even if people like Brandon are trying to kill it.

Is it a little smug and self-satisfied of Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow to have Valerie declare, “You can tell the press all you want that sitcoms are easy and that they don’t need genius, and that they’re not important, you know? But they have been culture-defining when they’re great, right?”

Sure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

Valerie, having found her backbone, is ultimately replaced on her sitcom by an AI version of Valerie, which sounds cynical — except that Valerie ends up getting a presumably far better job as the star of Jack’s new series, Judge’s Table, about a judge who leaves the law to become a chef.

Yes, The Comeback put on a happy face, for Valerie’s sake. And Valerie, the show and documentarian Jane (Laura Silverman) assured us, has grown over the 21 years. Definitely the Valerie who stood up to Brandon isn’t the Jane we met in the pilot. She’s a confident Emmy winner now, however fragile that Emmy statue, and presumably her latest comeback, may be.

So the end of The Comeback felt almost bizarrely upbeat, especially knowing that Valerie is going to be okay anyway, since the journey of the show brought her closer to husband Mark (Damian Young) and Mark is making plenty of money for the both of them.

The show ends by telling us Valerie picked up another Emmy nomination and that the rest of the cast of How’s That?! (less successful actors, presumably without their own Marks) were replaced by their AI equivalent, but that, per the final text on the screen, no AI was used in the writing of The Comeback.

So that’s a happy ending.

That’s a sad ending.

That’s a conclusive ending.

And I guess that even if it was only 29 episodes, The Comeback aired and kept coming back during such a tumultuous moment that it earned its finale and its finality.