When I meet someone new and they start quoting The Comeback, I know we’re destined to get along. For me, it’s a perfect barometer of taste. Like many fans of the cult comedy series I’ve been craving more episodes.
Thankfully, twenty years after the original season landed on HBO, The Comeback is making one helleva comeback with its third and what’s billed as its final season. Across eight episodes, co-creators Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, who stars as Emmy-winning TV star Valerie Cherish, take us deeper than ever with this much-cherished character. Kudrow delivers a nuanced tour-de-force, a work of dark comic genius filled to the brim with heart, as she peels back the character’s layers with the precision of a master. Along the way, King and Kudrow examine the stark realities of today’s entertainment landscape dominated by cost-cutting “content” creating conglomerates, the threat of AI, and the potential horrors of social media, especially going viral for the wrong reasons.
The result isn’t only sharp satire, but a touching hymn to how television should be made, a love letter to writers, warts and all, and a rallying cry for why we need humans in front of and behind the camera, not AI. King and Kudrow expertly, sometimes suitably uncomfortably, shift tones from laugh-out-loud hilarious, to deeply poignant moments that had me in tears. One episode ends with an affecting, beautifully executed tribute to Valerie’s hairdresser Mickey Deane, who was portrayed indelibly by the much-missed Robert Michael Morris.
With fun and clever callbacks to the previous two seasons, there is satisfying development and enrichment of relationships with existing characters. These include Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Jane (Laura Silverman), now working shifts at Trader Joe’s, Valerie’s husband Marky Mark (Damian Young) who has been fired from his high-powered job, and the currently out of work writer Paulie G. (Lance Barber). While Valerie has become slightly more self-aware and less self-absorbed over the years, her manager Billy (Dan Bucatinsky) is the now more focused on his own ambitions for stardom than his client’s, sporting a stylish new wardrobe with a signature Thom Browne kilt.
With first-rate casting, there is a host of new supporting characters who fit effortlessly into the world of the show. There’s Valerie’s clueless but endearing hypochondriac social media maven Patience (Ella Stiller), the understatedly chilling streamer boss played by Andrew Scott, a TV writing duo (John Early, Abbi Jacobson) full of disdain for the sitcom they’re charged with overseeing, and their hapless young writing assistant, Marco (Oh, Mary!’s Tony Macht), who is only interested in the house he wants to buy rather than show is he making.
Kudrow and King lead us to a pitch-perfect finale to this deliciously bittersweet comic masterpiece. How’s that?!
By James Kleinmann
The third and final season of the HBO Original comedy series The Comeback debuts Sunday, March 22nd, 2026 at 10:30pm ET on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max. New episodes of the eight-episode season will debut weekly leading up to the series finale on Sunday, May 10th.
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