The Comeback

“The Comeback” works astoundingly well for a third time. .... She [Kudrow] is just extraordinary in this role, and this victory lap only solidifies Valerie is one of the greatest pieces of full-bodied comedy creation in TV history.

“The Comeback” Season 3 regularly achieves what seems unachievable, which includes adding to the legacy of a classic.

Of all the many TV series that have taken on AI, from Black Mirror to Westworld to Mrs. Davis, it’s the new season of The Comeback that most trenchantly defines the stakes of letting computers take over the fundamentally human task of storytelling and disrupt the personal relationships that form between longtime collaborators.

Kudrow, in her element throughout this season, is a tour de force in her final outing as the beloved star, reminding us that at the end of the day, Valerie Cherish has never really needed a comeback: she's been here all along.

She’s still funny, sometimes foolish and still prone to malapropisms. .... In a season as upbeat as Valerie herself, “The Comeback” allows itself some moments of earned emotion.

The new season of “The Comeback” thrives largely on the very human art of casting. Kudrow, of course, is pitch-perfect, as are returning cast members including Damian Young as Valerie’s mopey husband, Mark, and Laura Silverman as her dogged documentarian, Jane. But the bit players are the scene stealers here.

The Comeback’s final season is an open-hearted valedictory send-off for Valerie Cherish, stumbling into the sunset as she goes. Despite a bit more bluntness than before, Kudrow and King give it everything they’ve got, capping an exquisite series of television. There’s never been anything quite like it.

Scene for scene, maybe not as laugh-out-loud as earlier seasons, but when the opportunities arrive, everyone brings their A-game. Kudrow remains glorious, and the (real) writers stuff every episode with little jokes and dropped asides.

Series three of The Comeback is six crisp half-hours of brutal workplace satire, even darker perhaps than the preceding two outings as it gleefully predicts Hollywood’s impending, self-administered doom.

Much of this season is shot as a conventional, non-meta television show, allowing us access to private conversations and meetings without having to account for Jane and her crew, or requiring the players to act as if they’re being watched. Paradoxically, without pretending to reality, it makes some things more real.

Valerie gets a hero’s journey and a happy ending that runs slightly counter to the bleak picture “The Comeback” otherwise paints. In light of such hiccups, it’s best to view Season 3 as a victory lap “The Comeback” has more than earned the right to make.

The final season of The Comeback is as funny and self-aware as the first two seasons, mainly because Kudrow continues to make Valerie Cherish one of the least self-aware characters on television.

You’ll never find a more hilarious prophet of AI doom than Lisa Kudrow. Her comic timing is a thing of beauty and sometimes terror.

The Comeback’s shaggy, despairing, hilarious, and sometimes baldly sentimental third season spends its first two episodes running through all the horsemen of the Hollywood-pocalypse.

Not everything works: The series misses the heart it got from Valerie’s friendship with her stylist, Mickey (Robert Michael Morris, who died in 2017), and the season’s efforts to replace the dynamic fall short. But this season ends up doing something devilishly surprising: It makes you feel almost — almost! — nostalgic for the Hollywood it spoofed in the first two.

The show’s approach to AI is not only an excellent source of comedy, but it provokes an essential conversation about the future of television and media in general. It’s always wonderful to have Valerie Cherish make another comeback, but Season 3 makes for a great curtain call.

A pretty good snapshot of a business, like Valerie, that feels as if it’s desperately hanging on by its fingernails.