When the World Needed Her Most, Valerie Cherish Reappeared
Celebrating the return of ‘The Comeback’ and sharing my idea for where to take the show.
The last time we saw Valerie, she was drenched like a drowned rat, decked out in her Emmy Awards finery. She’d ditched the ceremony for the Saperstein Critical Care unit of Cedar-Sinai Medical Center. “There’s nothing to be scared of,” she tells her friend Mickey Deane as he lay in his hospital bed. “Except for that hair,” he responds matter of factly. Her husband Mark joins shortly thereafter and the three of them proceed to watch the award show from the cramped hospital room. Moments later, she wins, much as the episode title — “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants” — foreshadowed.
She’s stunned. “Miss Cherish, speech, please,” Mickey demands, handing her his hospital bed remote. “Well, thank you, thank you. And I accept this remote on behalf of the two —” and her voice adjusts ever so slightly with less performance and more sincerity — ”most important men in my life.” A man next door tells them to keep it down and Mickey barks back, “Show some respect. She’s an Emmy winner!”
He then asks for his bag, grabs a curling iron from it and asks Mark to plug it in. “Just be careful what you unplug!” Valerie tells him. We then cut to the hospital hallway. “I’m so proud of you,” Mark tells Valerie. “That I came?” she asks. “That,” he says. “And everything.” She returns the compliment as they head out to attend some Emmy after parties. The 1966 classic “Cherish” by pop band The Association plays as the hospital hallway begins to fade away into black.
That was 2014. We thought it was the last time we’d see her. Of course, we had the same thought pattern nine years earlier when Valerie was signing autographs outside the studio after her appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. So it’s not so much shock as it is awe that 11 years after our last goodbye, Valerie is once again rising from the ashes like the red-headed phoenix she is. “This is the last one, alright?” she tells us in the all-too-familiar confessional chair first established in Season 1.
“Last time. Never doing this again. Well, I’ve got a new show. How’s that? And I’m so excited about it!”
In signature Jane (Valerie’s producer) fashion, she asks if Valerie can be more excited. They tussle and Valerie, in true Valerie fashion, walks off set. “She’ll be back,” Jane says knowingly. And with it came the announcement:
“The third and final season of The Comeback premieres in 2026 on HBO Max.”
It’s always been somewhat inevitable. “Oh God, I’d love to… and Michael Patrick King and I are always talking about what would happen next, always,” Kudrow told Newsweek’s H. Alan Scott just last year when asked if she’d ever do more, adding that “we’re due.” King offered a similar non-committal but enthusiastic response when I asked him in 2023:
“Valerie Cherish is an oil well that never goes dry for me.”
It’s a sentiment they’ve both expressed on many instances over the years, the desire for more, but never with any sense of urgency or assuredness… until now. I had hopes there might be something coming down the pike around the time King and I chatted as it would have lined up as Season 1: 2005, Season 2: 2014, Season 3: 2023. But there was nothing. I figured with the 20-year anniversary passing on June 5th without any kind of announcement, we might have to accept that King’s focus would remain on Carrie Bradshaw and co.
But not so. As Mark tells Valerie at the hospital when he first lays eyes on her: “There you are.” Here, once again, she is. We don’t know too much as of now. We don’t know if it’s been shot, is currently in production or will be shot later this year. We don’t know how many episodes or what the premise is. We do know, per Variety, that Damian Young (Mark, Valerie’s husband), Laura Silverman (Jane, the producer) and Dan Bucatinsky (Billy, Valerie’s publicist) will be back. Tragically, the show’s linchpin, Robert Michael Morris (Mickey) won’t be returning since he died in 2017.
It’s an astounding return for both a show and a character so indelible to those, like Mark, able to see the “there” there. The show often gets talked about with a retrospective lens, one that often paints it as being misunderstood. And sure, to some it was. But to my memory (and I was a Day 1), it’s always been simply about it being not seen by enough people to garner the necessary conversation to vault it into the zeitgeist. I have high hope that can change in the digital age with so much love built up over the last decade-plus, particularly because nothing in its wake quite grafts to what both the show and the character were able to create.
It was cultural commentary with judgement and acceptance, sprinkled with desperation. As such, it required of its viewer the ability to accept something that defied archetype.
“When Lisa and I pitched the series, we pitched that poster with Valerie standing in a meat grinder in a blue gown and the gown is shredding,” King told me during our interview.
“That's the premise of the show: She's grinding herself up to make entertainment. That was not on the landscape. I think that's what threw people so much, because Carrie Bradshaw did have deep feelings and dysfunctions and she had a massive affair. She did things that heroines weren't allowed to do on television, like be good and bad. Be right and wrong. Be your friend and the other woman. But, she looked good doing it. And in the end, there was a lot of a sparkle around Carrie in her darkness. There was always a shoe or a bag or something so the audience could go, ‘Yeah, but look what she's wearing!’”
Valerie didn’t allow for such a distraction. And the character’s effort to create a distraction — and fail at every turn — and triumph in spite of it made her so uncategorizable. I think that’s why so many of us love her: Her resilience.
I’ve spent many hours in the last 20 years trying to dream up a next act for Valerie. I had visions of her doing Broadway (maybe Mama Morton in Chicago?) and bringing cameras to capture it all, and I also considered her pivoting to politics inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jesse Ventura (her turn as Jeanetta Grace Susan in Death to 2020 was inspiring) and running for city council under the guise of bettering Hollywood’s reputation. But the difficulty I’ve always encountered is finding a way to get Valerie willfully back in front of the camera, especially after the events of the Season 2 finale in which she both got what she wanted and broke the fourth wall.
So here’s where I’ve landed. If Season 1 was about Valerie contending with the rise of reality television and Season 2 was her foray into the rise of prestige television then Season 3 should surely, in line with the trends, be about the rise of reboot culture. It makes so much sense, especially given that the show’s creator is currently helming one of the most talked about reboots, And Just Like That. I thought long and hard about whether it should be I’m It or Room and Bored being rebooted, and while both have merits, the latter makes more sense given the fact that Juna (Malin Akerman) and Chris (Kellan Lutz) have become celebrities in the world of the show. I love the idea of the network bringing back Room and Bored and suggesting a tandem reboot of The Comeback. How could she say no to that?
No matter what they ultimately decide, I’m grateful as fuck to have Valerie back on our screens. I was reminded of an essay that Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg penned for Vulture in 2019.
“When The Comeback was first canceled, one of the lines that I remember seeing about it was: ‘What’s so interesting about this show and this character is it’s a kind of character that you’ve seen men play before, but it feels different when it’s a woman.’ Maybe it’s harder for some audiences to accept these faults in a woman, or be this quote-unquote ‘unlikable’ the way that you would accept it in a man, like a Larry David or a David Brent. But I actually think that’s not giving enough credit to The Comeback — or Enlightened, which I think does a very similar thing and also does it incredibly well — because I’ve never seen a male character that is as fully realized as these two women. When you watch Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, yeah, he’s obnoxious and he’s hilarious, but he never makes you feel anything… There’s something very bold and audacious of throwing you into the world of Valerie Cherish and not giving you another POV character. She’s the person you’re with. She is going to be difficult. She is going to be hungry and desperate in a way that makes you uncomfortable. She is going to have outdated ideas about comedy and pop culture that make you roll your eyes. She’s going to say the wrong thing and make other people feel uncomfortable. But also, she is a wounded, vulnerable, fully realized human being and you are supposed to root for her. That’s a very difficult tightrope to walk. You so rarely get to see who she really is or what she really thinks, because she’s doing what she feels like she has to be doing, but she’s doing an awkward enough job of it that certain bits of humanity shine through. It’s Lisa’s incredible performance that allows you to see those cracks in the façade. It’s a master class for any actor.”
I look forward to more mastery ahead!