The comeback returns: valerie cherish's hollywood skewer is sharper than ever

Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish is back, and the industry—and we—are all the worse for it. After a decade-long hiatus, Michael Patrick King’s darkly comedic masterpiece, The Comeback, has returned to Max, and the premiere episode delivers the precise, uncomfortable brilliance that made the original so unforgettable. Forget polite satire; this is a full-frontal assault on Hollywood’s delusions of grandeur, delivered with a delightfully deranged grin.

A broadway revival and a generational divide

The season opens with Valerie Cherish, a faded sitcom star, attempting a Broadway comeback in Chicago – a move that echoes Whitney Leavitt's earlier career trajectory. But as always, the narrative quickly pivots from aspirational to absurd, showcasing the ever-widening chasm between Cherish’s outdated worldview and the realities of contemporary culture. The show doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable; a casual reference to the WGA/SAG strike and the lingering effects of COVID-19 ground the narrative in a very specific, and very now, moment.

One of the most compelling aspects of the revival is its willingness to confront the strange economics of fame. Valerie, desperate for relevance, is now leveraging podcasts – Cherish the Time, a name that drips with a desperate kind of irony – and even attempting to navigate the world of AI-generated content. The sheer gall with which she proclaims she'll do an AI series