‘The Comeback’ Comes Back! Creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King Break Down the Season 3 Premiere and Why This Is the End

Mar 22, 2026 8:00pm PT ‘The Comeback’ Comes Back! Creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King Break Down the Season 3 Premiere and Why This Is the End By Kate Aurthur SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Valerie Gets a New Chapter,” the Season 3 premiere of “ The Comeback ,” now streaming on HBO Max. “The Comeback,” as created by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King , was originally designed to be an ongoing series, a comedy that would go on until HBO or the creators themselves decided it had run its course. Sitcom actress Valerie Cherish — who was being followed by reality cameras documenting her so-called comeback on a crappy network show called “Room & Bored,” while also capturing every slight and humiliation — would have become just a character on a show. But that’s not what happened. Instead, the 2005 premiere of “The Comeback” coincided with a rare weak period for HBO, when the network that had birthed “Sex and the City” (which King ran for years) and “The Sopranos” was suffering from an identity crisis. During those fallow years, the powers that be then running the company decided to cancel “The Comeback” after a single 13-episode season. A funny thing happened, though, in the years after that cancellation. “The Comeback” — which had amassed a small, loving audience during its run, especially as viewers began to see where it was going — ascended to cult-classic status. When HBO decided to revive it in 2014 , approaching King and Kudrow to ask whether they had an idea for a second season, bringing back a show was, at that point in time, still a rare thing, and not the commonplace event it is today, as mega-corporations try to suck dry their IP. No, “The Comeback” had been revived by love. Its eight-episode second season tells the story about how Valerie learns that her “Room & Bored” nemesis Paulie G. (Lance Barber) has created “Seeing Red,” a dark dramedy for HBO in which, in his heroin-addled mind, he was tormented by the star of his sitcom, ...