‘The Comeback’ vs. ‘Hacks’: A Battle of Hollywood’s Last Women Standing
Lisa Kudrow and Jean Smart’s characters are ruthless commentary on aging, AI and the humiliations — and triumphs — of staying relevant
Happy Monday, and congratulations to the nearly sold-out matinee of Hoppers I attended with my children over the weekend. As my colleague Sean McNulty has tracked in The Wakeup each week, the Pixar film has been lingering in theaters for weeks on exactly the same powers that brought me there: You gotta do something with these kids when spring break seems to last forever. So maybe the real congratulations should go to this week’s big new release, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which will be ready to catch the next wave of spring break exhaustion. See ya there, fellow parents!
It may be a fun time out there at the movies — I’m especially eager to see what happens later this week when Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s The Drama finally unveils its long-rumored twist — but over here at Prestige Junkie, Emmy season is hitting its stride. For the next few weeks, I’ll take a look at some of the year’s top contenders, starting today with a new series that’s also an old show: Season 3 of The Comeback. Not that its lead character probably would love me calling out its age…
Back Again
Sometimes it can be hard to track incremental changes in Hollywood. We all know intellectually that the streaming era, the strikes and the pandemic have altered the business forever, but having lived through it all — and the fires, too — it can be hard to wake up each day and actually notice what’s shifted. What would happen if you fell asleep in 2014 and woke up to see what we have today? How would you handle it?
That’s more or less what the fictional Valerie Cherish is tasked with on the new season of The Comeback, the HBO series that was left for dead after a canceled first season in 2005, revived to huge acclaim in 2014, only to shuffle off again, and is now back for a third time against all odds. Now airing its eight-episode third season on HBO, The Comeback is an unlikely survivor of Hollywood’s current anxiety era, which might give it a shot of becoming something it’s never really been in its previous lives: a true Emmy contender.
The Comeback premiered in 2005 as star and co-creator Lisa Kudrow’s first project after Friends wrapped its titanic nine-season run, reviving a character she had created in her pre-Friends days at the Groundlings. Teaming up with Michael Patrick King, whose Sex and the City had also just ended its own culture-shifting run, Kudrow, then in her early 40s, introduced audiences to Valerie Cherish as a holdover from the ’90s sitcom era. The first season of the show focused on Valerie’s experimentation with the early days of reality TV and on the timeless humiliations of being an aging woman in Hollywood — including being cast as the comic-relief Aunt Sassy on the network sitcom Room and Bored.
An early vanguard of the now-ubiquitous mockumentary format — The Comeback premiered within months of the American version of The Office — the first season was ahead of its time, probably to its detriment. In the era of Entourage’s Hollywood fantasy and a still-thriving network TV model, who was willing to see the struggle looming behind it? The Comeback earned Emmy nominations for Kudrow as best actress in a comedy and for King’s directing, but lost both. Here’s how different a time it was: Kudrow lost to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was starring on the CBS sitcom The New Adventures of Old Christine. King lost to the pilot of My Name Is Earl.
Nearly a decade after that first season was canceled, The Comeback, well, came back in 2014 for another eight episodes, this time finding Valerie at the height of the Peak TV era. In addition to her reality show (also called The Comeback, keep up!), Valerie ends up starring as a much-less-flattering version of herself in an HBO dramedy called Seeing Red, about the making of Room and Bored. Yes, it’s meta and complicated, and even Valerie herself has a hard time wrapping her head around the idea of a comedy with fewer jokes. (She was, as usual, ahead of her time, and about a decade too early for all the jokes about The Bear.)
Kudrow once again received Emmy recognition for the show. But you only have to look at her category’s competition from that year to chart how dramatically the comedy landscape had changed. In 2006, Kudrow was the only best actress nominee from a cable series; in 2014, the math flipped. The only network nominee was Amy Poehler for Parks and Recreation. The other five nominees were cable stars (like Edie Falco from Showtime’s Nurse Jackie or Amy Schumer from Inside Amy Schumer) and one streaming lead (Lily Tomlin from Netflix’s Grace & Frankie).
A lot had shifted in eight years, but one thing stayed the same: Kudrow still lost to Julia Louis-Dreyfus. But this time, Louis-Dreyfus won for her prestige cable show, Veep (it was the fourth of what would be six wins for Louis-Dreyfus as the lead of the HBO comedy).
The fictional Valerie Cherish did win an Emmy for Seeing Red, but as we see in the season 3 premiere of The Comeback, that didn’t spare her from any of the new indignities cooked up by Hollywood in the past decade. In the second episode, which aired last night, she takes a meeting at the fictional streaming service NuNet, where she’s been offered a role on a new multi-camera sitcom that will not-so-secretly be written by AI. When the lizardy head of the network (Andrew Scott, perfect) rattles off some of Valerie’s past credits, she proudly mentions the detective series Mrs. Hatt that aired on Epix, to the blank stares of everyone else on the Zoom screen.
I’m watching The Comeback in real time as it airs, but even the warm reviews of the new season suggest it might go a little overboard in warning about the dangers of AI; having Fran Drescher play herself in the season premiere, marching on the 2023 SAG-AFTRA picket lines, was probably a good indicator of that. But with Apple’s The Studio not in this year’s Emmy mix as a too-close-for-comfort Hollywood satire, The Comeback may very well fill that spot, and give the Emmys the chance to finally reward Kudrow for seeing the future when nobody else did.
Or she’ll lose again to another comedy legend at the peak of her unbeatable run: Jean Smart.
When Hacks returns to HBO Max on April 9 for its final season, we’ll have two insider Hollywood comedies focused on aging women battling to stay relevant, airing at the same time — both on the premium cable network that faces its own uncertain future. (God, can you imagine how many mean jokes Smart’s Deborah Vance has made about Valerie Cherish over the years?) HBO has already sent screeners for the former Emmy winner, and while reviews are embargoed for now, it will come as no surprise that Hacks has its own take on AI, consolidation, streaming and all the other Hollywood anxieties The Comeback is also tackling.
Hacks won best comedy two years ago in an upset over The Bear, but came up short last year versus The Studio. Still, without Seth Rogen’s series in competition this year (the currently filming second season will likely be eligible for the 2027 Emmys), Hacks finds itself back in prime position to win — unless The Comeback starts to siphon off some support because of its similar milieu.
Regardless of how the comedy series Emmy race takes shape in the weeks ahead, however, the best actress competition is almost guaranteed to come down to Smart, a seven-time Emmy winner who has never lost for Hacks (winning four times thus far), and Kudrow, whose only Emmy win was for Friends in 1998.
It’s a real no-bad-outcome situation, and while it seems like Smart will likely run the table for Hacks, it’s also hard not to root for a real-world version of the season 2 finale of The Comeback, where Valerie Cherish won an Emmy. And if not, based on historical precedent, there’s always the possibility of another Emmy run for Kudrow and The Comeback in a decade or so.