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‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: Getting the Band Back Together

Valerie doesn’t fully understand why people in Hollywood are so worked up about A.I. She just sees a wave she thinks she knows how to ride. ‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Valerie...

NYTIMES 입력 2026.03.30 12:10 0

‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: Getting the Band Back Together

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‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: Getting the Band Back Together

Valerie doesn’t fully understand why people in Hollywood are so worked up about A.I. She just sees a wave she thinks she knows how to ride.

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· 7:21 min

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The director James Burrows, as himself, with Lisa Kudrow, as Valerie Cherish, in a scene from “The Comeback.”

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Erin Simkin/HBO

Noel Murray

March 29, 2026,

11:10 p.m. ET

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‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Valerie Has a Secret’

For most of the first two seasons of “The Comeback,” the show held fast to a documentary style, with lots of jittery hand-held shots and characters speaking directly into the camera. But did you notice something different about the Season 3 premiere?

After the opening Broadway sequence — and after Valerie’s resident documentarian, Jane, scurried back to Los Angeles — the rest of the episode looked like any other prestige cable comedy. Aside from some shots from security cameras and Patience’s phone, the overall look last week was very un-“Comeback.”

That change carries over to this week … at least at first. The director and co-writer Michael Patrick King has some fun with framing in the episode’s first half, showing how reality can be abstracted by technology in our modern world.

In the opening scene, Valerie arrives for a meeting at NuNet — the network producing her new sitcom, “How’s That?!” — and we get a fantastic shot where Patience’s cellphone fills the center of frame, blocking Valerie’s face so we can see her only via the phone’s camera. And then inside NuNet, Valerie gets stuck on a Zoom conference call with dozens of the network’s employees, each waving at her silently from little boxes on a big screen. The real world keeps looking more and more distant and blocked off.

And in each of these moments, Valerie seems bewildered. For about 20 years, off and on, she has had Jane and her camera crew hovering whenever she has made a big new career move. Something feels off-kilter.

That all changes when Jane returns. Valerie finds her ex-employee by chance, working as a checkout clerk at a Trader Joe’s near Valerie’s new apartment. In the years since fleeing New York, Jane has fallen on hard times: deeply in debt, unable to get anyone to back her heavily political documentaries, and forced off her ranch by the wildfires. (“Our whole canyon burned because we didn’t pay off the right fire department,” she complains to Valerie, whose Brentwood home survived unscathed.)

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