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This column contains spoilers for the May 10 series finale of The Comeback, though is The Comeback really the sort of plot-rich show that you worry about having spoiled for you?
A good finale — a good planned finale, at least — is the destination of a journey measured in years, in seasons, in episodes.
HBO’s The Comeback is a uniquely modern show insofar as Sunday’s finale was the culmination of nearly 21 years since the series’ June 5, 2005, launch. Or maybe it was the culmination of three seasons — pretty reasonable by today’s premium cable standards, but hardly epic. Or perhaps it was the culmination of 29 episodes of television, roughly the number that The Comeback star Lisa Kudrow‘s Friends would produce in its typical season, plus a month.
I mention this because when I watched the series finale of The Comeback back in March, having binged eight screeners in a weekend, it felt like Kudrow and co-creator Michael Patrick King had leaned too much into the “finale” aspect, aiming for a level of conclusiveness that felt needlessly tidy at best or generally unearned at worst. I accepted that maybe I’ve never been the biggest fan of The Comeback — it’s a show I liked, but never loved in the way its most passionate supporters have — and so perhaps the seemingly overly happy and resolved ending just wasn’t for me.
