‘The Comeback’ Season 3 Review: Lisa Kudrow Takes On AI—and Hollywood Itself (HBO)

There probably aren’t many TV shows that take a full decade off between seasons. The Comeback is one of those rare cases where the gap has less to do with the show’s quality and more with the business mechanics of television itself. What you get, almost by accident, is a series—and a character—that vanish completely and then reappear when no one is expecting them. It wasn’t designed that way (this isn’t some carefully planned Before Sunrise-style long game), but the result is something more interesting: a running commentary on how Hollywood has mutated over the last twenty—really, thirty—years. Back when the show premiered in 2005, Lisa Kudrow was already famous from a little, obscure sitcom called Friends.

At first, The Comeback played like a semi-autobiographical riff on Kudrow’s own career. Her character, Valerie Cherish, felt like a plausible alter ego: a sitcom star from the ’90s struggling to find work after the spotlight fades. In 2005, her big shot at relevance came via what the show treated as the ultimate villain of modern storytelling—the reality show. Formally, the series doubled down on that idea by presenting everything through “documentary” cameras, constantly reminding us that Valerie is always being watched, always performing, even when she thinks she isn’t.

The second season didn’t arrive until 2014—revived after cancellation thanks to a growing cult following—and found Valerie producing her own reality-doc hybrid while working on a “prestige” drama that brought her professional credibility and personal misery in equal measure. Another twelve years go by. The third season opens in 2023, in the middle of a writers’ strike and a post-pandemic industry, with Valerie trying (and failing) to land a role in Chicago. The problem isn’t just the competition—it’s the quiet realization that she no longer has the age, or maybe the stamina, to keep up with performers half her age.

By 2026, the new comeback hasn’t quite happened. Valerie is in her late 50s, hosting a podcast she barely seems interested in herself. Money isn’t the issue—her husband, “Marky” Mark, did well in business before pivoting into reality TV—but she still needs a job to keep her ever-shrinking documentary crew afloat. Then comes the offer. A big studio executive (played by Andrew Scott) hands her the lead in a new sitcom called How’s That?. It sounds perfect—except for one small, dystopian catch: the show is written entirely by AI. No human writers. None. And she’s not allowed to tell anyone else on the cast or crew. Valerie, who has never been great at saying no to a starring role, says yes.

That premise becomes the show’s new engine. Valerie keeps running into the strange mix of efficiency and absurdity that comes with machine-generated storytelling—scripts rewritten in seconds, scenes that suddenly make no sense, systems that crash at the worst possible moment. With barely any humans left in the loop (the poor souls hired to “supervise” the AI don’t last long), the set starts to feel like a workplace run by ghosts. Around that, The Comeback continues to track Valerie’s relationships—with her husband, her loyal (and exhausted) team, her co-stars, and the industry at large—while also acknowledging the absence of her best friend and hairstylist Mickie, a role made bittersweet by the real-life passing of Robert Michael Morris in 2017.

If you zoom out far enough—back to when Kudrow became a star in Friends more than three decades ago—you start to see The Comeback as a satirical companion piece to the recent history of American television. At one point, someone more or less sums it up: “We thought reality TV and streaming were going to kill us, but we survived. I’m not sure we’ll survive AI.” It lands as both a joke and a genuine concern. The industry today barely resembles the one from thirty years ago, when cable and the internet were novelties, social media didn’t exist, and network TV was still the center of gravity.

In recent years, that kind of industry satire has found sharp new expressions in shows like Hacks and The Studio—the latter created by Seth Rogen, who actually appeared in The Comeback’s second season and clearly took notes. But Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King were ahead of the curve, diagnosing Hollywood’s contradictions long before they became obvious. In that sense, the show belongs to a much older tradition: the entertainment industry critiquing itself, something cinema has been doing since at least the 1940s, when television first threatened its dominance.

What Kudrow and King do here—always lightly, always with humor—is go straight for the jugular. If machines start replacing humans across the board, what exactly is left of Hollywood? The show even spells it out: first the writers go, then the actors, eventually the executives. Who’s left standing after that?

Most episodes remain breezy and very funny, built around the small humiliations and minor victories of Valerie’s day-to-day life on set. But gradually, almost sneakily, a heavier tone creeps in. The questions get bigger. The jokes sting a little more. With a parade of well-placed cameos and Kudrow in absolute command—she’s still one of the great, most precise comic performers around—The Comeback starts to feel like both a time capsule and a warning.

And then there’s the backdrop: those massive studio lots, full of history, still standing—for now. The show is produced by Warner Bros. and shot on its legendary stages, and while it obviously doesn’t get into corporate mergers or boardroom drama, the subtext is unavoidable. You look at those sets, packed with decades of stories, and it’s hard not to feel a little emotional.