Before I get into today’s main feature, some breaking news: Glenn Close, Ridley Scott, animator Floyd Norman and Killer Films partners Christine Vachon and Pamela Koffler have been named this year’s honorary Oscar recipients. They’ll be recognized at the Academy’s Governors Awards in November, consistently one of the highlights of the awards season calendar, and though the winners won’t be featured on the main Oscar telecast, the full speeches will be on YouTube — with no threat of the orchestra playing them off. Close and Scott are both famously overdue for Oscars, with 12 nominations and zero wins between them. The pioneering animator Norman and fearlessly indie producers Vachon and Koffler, meanwhile, represent vital parts of Hollywood history that don’t show up often enough on the Oscar stage. (Vachon and Koffler will receive the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, given to producers “whose body of work reflects a consistently high quality of motion picture production.”) My colleague Christopher Rosen and I will be talking much more about these honorary winners in a live Prestige Junkie After Party conversation tomorrow at 11 a.m. PT — join us then!
Now, on with the show…
Hollywood had to get weird and desperate enough to bring Valerie Cherish back.
The character — created by Lisa Kudrow at The Groundlings in L.A. and later brought to life in the series co-created by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King — had already been part of the birth of reality TV in the mid-’00s and the peak of prestige TV in the mid-’10s. What new, terrifying Hollywood development could Valerie bear witness to next? Kudrow and King spent a decade trying to figure out what would be worthy of a third season for their show, The Comeback — and then came AI.
In the third season of The Comeback, which aired on HBO this spring, Valerie Cherish — a ’90s sitcom star who found new fame with her reality show of the same name back in the early 2000s, and even won an Emmy during her, er, comeback — is “getting everything she wants,” says King. She’s the lead of a new sitcom, How’s That?!, and even has an executive producer credit on the show. That means she has to endure meetings with the unsettlingly placid head of the network (played by a perfectly reptilian Andrew Scott), but she also finally has some power in addition to her starring role. That is, if she can keep the secret that the show is actually almost entirely written by AI.
“In season one, she’s going over one line 17 times to get it right,” says King, who directed and co-wrote (with Kudrow) every episode of the new season. “In season three, she says at one point, ‘I have 53 pages of lines to learn — and 46 alts just showed up from AI.’ It’s showing what happens when you put someone in the power position, and the thrill of it was to see that [Valerie] was up to the task.”
Kudrow, 62, and King, 71, had already come up with an excellent sendoff for Valerie at the end of season two. “People threw the word perfect around,” King says with a hint of pride. Finally putting her loved ones ahead of her career, Valerie showed genuine growth and empathy in that season finale, something neither creator was willing to take back for the sake of a more dramatic third season. Writing this newly mature Valerie, King says, they would ask themselves, “Where’s the cringe? Where are the moments where she is being totally Valerie and the audience is screaming, ‘Don’t say that!’”
So while Valerie is in many ways a hero in season three — stepping up as a leader on a sitcom that doesn’t have a human showrunner — she’s also struggling to keep the big AI secret.
“It became this Deep Throat subplot that amused me to no end,” says King. It’s also, in true Comeback fashion, scarily realistic about the state of modern Hollywood. “The idea that the studio would not want to announce that they were using AI until they knew it worked felt like a very Hollywood thing — what a studio will and won’t admit to unless they absolutely have to.”
When King and Kudrow settled on the idea of using AI in this season, HBO chief Casey Bloys told them to move as quickly as possible — presumably to make sure they were out before a TV show actually did admit to being written by AI.
That hasn’t happened yet, but “it’s coming,” King says. There’s a scene in the Comeback finale where a group of powerful writers meets with Valerie after the show’s use of AI has gone public, telling her she’s being used as a human front. “You’re going to start to see the human face of AI now,” King continues.
At the end of The Comeback, everything turns out okay for Valerie. Her work on How’s That?! gets the attention of a John Wells-type mega-writer (played by Bradley Whitford) who hires Valerie for a much better new show, even as How’s That?! continues on for many more seasons in which all of the actors have now been replaced by AI versions of themselves. (A title card notes with acidity that the show has a “70 percent completion rate” and “people like to leave it on while they do — whatever.”)
But even though Valerie escapes the AI hellscape, The Comeback has no grand solution for how to fix it. “At one point somebody said to us in the middle of the writing process, ‘So what are you telling us? What’s the moral?’” King remembers. “And I just shut down for three days and said to Lisa, ‘What is the moral?’ And then we just decided we’re not giving a moral.”
Instead, King continues, “We’re reporting from the front lines. I wanted to show the reality of people at Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf panicked and maybe even applying to Costco for a job. I mean, our job was to show how the fear and the panic is affecting the humans as they face the machine.”
The final episode ends with one last title card, asserting that “no AI was used in the writing of this series.” King says he felt compelled to add it not just to clear the air — “people are thinking everyone’s using AI” — but also for emotional reasons. “It’s almost like when you look at a garment, and it says handmade. It means something when you see that. So putting a label on the end of our show saying this was handmade by people isn’t a bad thing.”
The Comeback has always been ahead of its time, to the point that it was canceled after its first season in 2005 only to be revived after becoming a cult hit. So maybe the note of optimism at the end of the season is a glimpse of our future, too. “Lisa’s great philosophy is that the audience will tell you if it works,” King says. “I think originality and the human spirit is hard to spark in somebody watching a show. It’s easy to mimic, but it’s very hard to surprise someone. I think that’s all the audience is looking for.”
Take Heated Rivalry for example, King continues. “If you had prompted ‘gay, soft-core porn hockey show that women audiences want to see’ — no one would have made that prompt. It was surprising, it was new — and that’s not AI.”
Old Is New
Valerie Cherish’s return to TV may be the most discussed of this season — “comeback” is right there in the title, after all. But there’s a surprising number of characters in this year’s Emmy mix who have lived very, very long lives on television and are now being used in fascinating and creative ways.
Jean Smart’s Deborah Vance on Hacks and Steve Martin’s Charles Haden-Savage on Only Murders in the Building, like Valerie, both found fame on TV hits of previous decades. But that’s all fiction within fiction; The Paper’s Oscar Nuñez is doing it for real, reviving his character from NBC’s The Office in a brand-new setting, but still with very little patience for the faux documentary crew following his character around. (“Not again,” he sighs when the cameras first find him.)
The onscreen life of Carrie Preston’s Elsbeth isn’t quite as long, having made her debut on The Good Wife at the end of its first season in 2010. But she shines in an entirely new way in her spinoff series Elsbeth, which made the leap from the drama to comedy Emmy race this year, reflecting Preston’s quirky central character and the colorful crimes she’s now solving as a New York City detective.
Reboots are now just as common in television as they are in film, and plenty of familiar comedy characters have given us a chance to catch up lately. Over on the revived Scrubs — which returned for its 10th season 16 years after the conclusion of its ninth — Zach Braff and Donald Faison seemingly haven’t missed a beat as doctor besties JD and Turk, except that thanks to Turk’s sciatica, they can no longer do their signature high-five. Age comes for us all, even on television, which is especially evident in the Malcolm in the Middle reboot, subtitled Life’s Still Unfair, which finds Frankie Muniz’s Malcolm now a father himself and tentatively connecting with his oddball family.
And we may have now said goodbye to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw for good at the end of And Just Like That, another Michael Patrick King production. The three-season coda to Sex and the City ended with Carrie — what else? — writing and looking wistfully out a window while wearing a fabulous outfit.
When it comes to long lives, though, it’s hard to hold a candle to Spider-Man, who finds inventive new life on Spider-Noir more than 60 years after making his comic book debut. The comedy series, released in both black-and-white and color versions, reimagines the webslinger as a hard-boiled 1930s detective played by Nicolas Cage. Hey, if Spider-Man can find that inventive new life, who’s to say these other TV characters won’t have more twists and turns ahead for them, too?
