Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow didn’t mean to be so on the nose with the title of their HBO comedy “The Comeback.” But, it turns out, that has actually been the case for the show — every ten years, it makes another comeback.
“It’s more meta than we tried to be,” Kudrow tells Variety‘s Awards Circuit Podcast. Adds King: “The second season we thought was going to come back right after the first season, and that did not happen, and here, it became our brand to be this thing that comes back every decade!”
“The Comeback” first launched in 2005, was canceled, then revived in 2014 — and then returned for a third and final season this past March. Again, they didn’t mean to do this, but “The Comeback” wound up being quite a chronicle of how the business has changed over the past 20 years. So why end it now?
“Because it’s a perfect piece,” Kudrow says. “It’s a trilogy, and that’s perfect, it’s completely full circle. First season, reality shows were an extinction event for scripted television. This one, it’s AI that’s an extinction events.”
Says King: “We’re always having potential extinction events, which create enormous fear and comedy. I mean, we thought reality TV was going to end narrative TV, and now it’s just like there’s another wing on the house that you go to if you want to see reality TV. We sort of posture at the end of this, we say maybe there will be incredibly well-received and emotional human shows, and then there will be shows with digital actors that people can leave on while they do whatever. We made room for it, because I think it’s real. That’s why we have a whole final series, because the threat is very real.”
