The Comeback review – Lisa Kudrow is back as Valerie Cherish … but with no laughs

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Valerie Cherish may just be the closest thing America has to its own Alan Partridge. Both narcissists clinging desperately to 1990s showbiz successes (starring in a popular sitcom and hosting a BBC chatshow respectively), they are also two rare examples of comedy characters who have returned sporadically over multiple decades: Steve Coogan’s alter ego made his television debut 32 years ago, while Lisa Kudrow first appeared as Cherish in The Comeback in 2005, returning for a second season nine years later and a third this week.

Yet the pair are most alike as prisms through which their creators can satirise the ever-evolving entertainment landscape. Thus far, Partridge’s career has been bookended by sports commentary and self-funded documentaries about mental health; in between we’ve had sendups of local radio, travelogues, podcasting, celebrity memoir and teatime magazine shows. The Comeback, meanwhile, began as a twin spoof of the studio sitcom and reality TV. Co-created by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King (best known for directing and writing for Sex and the City and And Just Like That), season one revolved around the making of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Cherish’s return to work in a trashy comedy called Room and Bored. In 2014, The Comeback – the name of both the actual show and the reality TV programme within it – was revived to chronicle another career renaissance; this time, Cherish won serious acclaim as the star of Seeing Red, a dark dramedy inspired by the real-life conflict between her and Room and Bored’s heroin-addicted co-writer Paulie G.

It was all very meta and prescient; now Kudrow returns to grapple with the zeitgeist once more. We find Valerie enjoying semi-retirement in her swanky condo, busied by banal podcasting and incessant social media content (not all created by her: a disastrous stint on The Traitors turned her into a popular meme). So, when the president of a major studio (Andrew Scott, part of an impressive guest star roster) offers her the lead in a new old-school sitcom, it seems too good to be true. And it is. How’s That? – about a New England B&B owner called Beth – will be secretly penned by a large language model. Initially, this puts Cherish in a bind; AI was a key concern of the 2023 US writers’ strikes. But she’s easily consoled by vague assurances about human showrunners, and signs on the dotted line.

The Comeback doesn’t exactly make comedic hay from this premise. The AI messes up occasionally – one script randomly relocates Beth to prison – but is generally very competent, reeling off reams of lame gags suited to this brand of traditional, multi-cam show. So, is this a satire of comedy so lazy a computer programme could write it? Not at all. Despite How’s That? having been greenlit with the sole purpose of providing undemanding TV – viewers can stream it ambiently in the background (a real trend) – The Comeback ends up being a love letter to this type of show – but only if it is made by humans. AI’s crime is not that it produces comedy that is generic and derivative, but that it prevents humans from producing comedy that is generic and derivative (LA, we are told, has reached apocalyptic levels of unemployment).

The rest is equally hard to buy into. The Comeback originally combined naturalistic character study with conceptual clarity: what we were seeing was supposedly “raw footage” from the crew following Cherish around, often to agonisingly awkward ends. Season three maintains this device with dwindling justification – where is a reality show about a middle-aged sitcom actor airing in this day and age? – but also switches randomly in and out of mock-doc mode.

And, while Cherish may have started out as a sharp-elbowed has-been like Partridge, 21 years on she’s a reformed character. The Comeback has always been unequivocal about her skills; she was a diva on the set of Room and Bored but her performance was consistently masterly. But now everyone she meets falls over themselves to tell her how great she is. She’s a joy to work with too, uniting the cast of How’s That? and delivering innumerable pep talks, her perma-smile almost as irritating as her verbal ticks – the “you knows” and “rights” that seem to have replaced all compelling dialogue.

The Comeback was always more of a meditation on comedy than a comedy in itself, but this return is essentially devoid of humour. Our protagonist is no longer monstrous, the satire is toothless and the majority of Cherish’s interactions are exercises in trite sentimentality. Perhaps that’s fitting, this being a heartfelt paean to an artform battered by modernity. Sadly, The Comeback doesn’t inspire much confidence in its future.