‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 3: The Aww-Ick

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‘The Comeback’ Season 3, Episode 3: The Aww-Ick

This week’s episode suggests that Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King don’t mind mixing in a little sentiment with their satire.

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Lisa Kudrow in “The Comeback.”

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Erin Simkin/HBO

By

Noel Murray

April 5, 2026,

11:00 p.m. ET

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Season 3, Episode 3: ‘Valerie Faces Reality’

Ever heard of an “aww-ick?” According to Josh Abrams — one of the credited human screenwriters on the mostly A.I.-written sitcom “How’s That?!” — aww-ick is a term for a scene on a sitcom that makes the audience go “aww” and the writers go “ick.” He’s talking about the kind of saccharine moments that were common in TV comedy for decades, before “Seinfeld” came along in the 1990s with its “

no hugging, no learning

” policy. Josh considers himself and his wife, Mary, to be sophisticated artists, so he wants to keep any aww-ick far away from “How’s That?!”

But Valerie Cherish loves that stuff. So does Jimmy Burrows, her director of choice for “How’s That?!” And so — maybe — do Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King? At the very least, judging by this week’s episode, “The Comeback” creators don’t mind mixing in a little sentiment with their satire.

In “Valerie Faces Reality,” Valerie finally gets to start making her new show. Right away, she can see the pluses in having Al, the A.I. assistant, always on-call. During rehearsals, Jimmy tells Valerie that he thinks the script could use some punching up (before saying, conspiratorially, “Is the studio afraid to say that to the Matrix?”). The first episode is too slapstick-y, he thinks. From his decades of Emmy-winning experience, he can sense when a show could use some heart.

So Jimmy has Marco (Tony Macht), a production assistant hovering nearby, tell Al what the episode needs. Minutes later, Valerie has fresh script pages in her hand. It’s so easy! After all, “How’s That?!” isn’t meant to be original. It’s meant to remind the NuNet audience of every sitcom they watched in syndication when they were kids. Artificial Intelligence is very good at generating something formulaic. But more to the point: Jimmy knows how to direct it, and Valerie knows how to play it. They’re skilled craftspeople who know how to make something that — at the very least — is functional.

But not everybody on this production is as accommodating as Al, alas. There are humans everywhere, with egos and complaints. Josh, for example, hears about the new scene and drops what he was supposed to be doing (walking the dog, according to an annoyed Mary) to see what the computer spit out. He thinks the addition is awful — an aww-ick — and that it doesn’t properly represent him as “the voice of women of a certain age.”

One of the elements of “The Comeback” that makes the show so complex is that the non-Valerie characters are always going to remain somewhat opaque to us, because we only see them in passing, when they happen to be in the same space as her. Given the clues that we have so far about Josh and Mary — including a mysterious comment from Mary that “we’re not doing that on this show,” after Josh throws a tantrum — it seems likely that they’ve had trouble finding work since the end of their dog park sitcom, and that they’re allowing their names to go on “How’s That?!” strictly for the money. At any rate, Mary would rather they not get creatively invested. She suggests to Josh that they should let the old pros handle things, gesturing at Jimmy and Valerie. “He’s a genius,” Mary says. “And she’s … an executive producer.”

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