Why The Comeback Deserved Its Happy Ending — Even If It Never Earned One
There's something quietly radical about a show that spends years humiliating its main character and then, against all narrative logic, lets her win. The Comeback did exactly that. And honestly? We're still thinking about it.
HBO's mockumentary series starring Lisa Kudrow as Valerie Cherish is one of the most uncomfortable, brilliant, and misunderstood comedies ever made. It ran for a single season in 2005, got cancelled, disappeared for nearly a decade, and then came back in 2014 for a second season that somehow managed to be even sharper than the first. The ending it landed on wasn't earned in the traditional sense — Valerie doesn't grow, doesn't learn, doesn't transform into a better person. But she gets her moment anyway. And that choice says everything about what the show was actually doing all along.
Who Is Valerie Cherish, and Why Does She Matter?
Lisa Kudrow co-created the series alongside Michael Patrick King, and her performance as Valerie is one of the most technically demanding pieces of comedic acting in television history. Valerie is a faded sitcom star trying to claw her way back into relevance. She's needy, oblivious, and relentlessly self-sabotaging. She's also, underneath all of that, desperately human.
Kudrow plays her without a safety net. There's no winking at the audience, no moment where Valerie becomes self-aware enough to earn our sympathy cleanly. Instead, the show forces us to sit with the discomfort of watching someone want something so badly and be so poorly equipped to get it. It's excruciating in the best possible way.
The first season aired the same year Arrested Development was on Fox — another misunderstood comedy that got cancelled before its time. Both shows were ahead of the cultural conversation around cringe comedy and the ethics of humiliation as entertainment. The Comeback just happened to be the one that got buried faster.
The Gap Between Seasons and What Changed
Nine years is a long time. When The Comeback returned in 2014, the television landscape had shifted dramatically. Peak TV was in full swing. Girls, Transparent, and Orange Is the New Black were rewriting what prestige cable could look like. Audiences had been trained by then to appreciate exactly the kind of uncomfortable, character-driven storytelling that The Comeback had pioneered.
The second season leaned into this self-awareness. Valerie is now working on an HBO show — a thinly veiled prestige drama — that is explicitly based on her humiliation from the first season. The meta layers stack up fast. She's being exploited again, this time by a showrunner who sees her pain as raw material. Sound familiar?
This is where the show gets genuinely cutting. It's not just a comedy about a delusional woman. It's a critique of the entertainment industry's appetite for female suffering, dressed up as art. The second season earned Emmy nominations and critical re-evaluation in a way the first never got the chance to.
What "Earning" a Happy Ending Actually Means
Traditional narrative structure says characters earn their endings through change. Walter White earns his death. Tony Soprano earns his ambiguity. Even in comedies, there's usually some moment of growth that justifies the resolution.
Valerie Cherish never really grows. She goes into the final episode of the second season essentially the same person she was in episode one of the first. Vain, fragile, performative, and utterly convinced that the camera loves her.
And yet — she wins her Emmy. She gets the moment she's been chasing for a decade.
The genius of this choice is that it reframes what the show was actually arguing. The Comeback isn't a story about whether Valerie deserves success. It's a story about the randomness of who gets to succeed in Hollywood, and the brutal cost of wanting it anyway. Giving her the happy ending without the redemption arc is the most honest thing the show could have done. Real life doesn't require you to earn it. Sometimes you just get lucky. Sometimes the industry chews you up and then, inexplicably, hands you a trophy.
That's not cynicism. That's clarity.
The Performances That Make It Work
Beyond Kudrow, the supporting cast does extraordinary work. Robert Michael Morris as Mickey, Valerie's loyal hairdresser and best friend, brings genuine warmth to a show that could otherwise feel relentlessly cold. Damian Young, Lance Barber, and Malin Åkerman all contribute to the first season's suffocating sitcom-within-a-show dynamic.
In the second season, Seth Rogen appears as a fictionalized version of himself, and his scenes with Kudrow have a genuine unease that elevates the whole enterprise. The casting choices throughout both seasons feel deliberate and precise — nobody is here by accident.
Why the Show Still Resonates
We live in a media environment now where reality TV, docuseries, and celebrity redemption arcs are everywhere. The Comeback predicted all of it. The way Valerie performs for the documentary cameras — always aware of the lens, always managing her image — reads differently in 2024 than it did in 2005. Every influencer, every celebrity Instagram story, every carefully staged "candid" moment is Valerie Cherish behavior.
The show also anticipated the conversation around who gets to tell stories about women's ambition and failure. Shows like Fleabag, I May Destroy You, and Abbott Elementary all exist in a tradition that The Comeback helped establish — the idea that a woman can be messy, unlikable, and still be the center of a story worth caring about.
Kudrow herself has spoken about how ahead of its time the show felt, and how painful the original cancellation was. The fact that it came back at all — and came back better — is its own kind of narrative justice.
Where to Watch
Both seasons of The Comeback are available to stream, and if you haven't seen them yet, now is genuinely the best time to start. Movie OTT is your go-to destination for tracking down exactly where to watch titles like this — whether you're hunting for the full HBO run, looking for related Lisa Kudrow projects, or want to explore other critically underrated comedies from the same era. Movie OTT keeps its streaming availability information current, so you're not wasting time chasing dead links or outdated platform listings.
Final Thoughts
The Comeback is a show about wanting too much and being punished for it — until, suddenly, you're not. It's uncomfortable, precise, and genuinely funny in ways that sneak up on you. Lisa Kudrow's performance is career-defining. The writing is ruthless. The ending is unearned and perfect.
If you've been sleeping on this one, stop. And if you watched it years ago and thought you were done with it — go back. It hits differently now.
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