Recently, there has been a surge of excellent Hollywood satire on television. Apple TV’s The Studio provides a look at the film industry from the viewpoint of the market-savvy executives at the top. Disney+’s Wonder Man presents the movie business through the eyes of an aspiring actor trying to make it in this chaotic environment.

This trend is partly due to Hollywood’s penchant for self-celebration, but also because the industry has become more open to ridicule in recent years. By engaging with generative A.I., inundating theaters with nostalgic cash-grabs, and prolonging strikes unnecessarily, Tinseltown’s executives have provided creatives ample material for their work.

HBO’s The Comeback has stood out as a defining satire of showbiz for three decades. The first season, which premiered in 2005, features Lisa Kudrow in a self-referential role as washed-up sitcom star Valerie Cherish. Following up on a massive hit like Friends is always challenging for an actor, but Kudrow embraced it with a show about an actress struggling to follow up her career-defining success.

The Comeback was ahead of its time in mocking the self-indulgence and authenticity issues of reality television. It accurately captured the essence before reality TV had truly taken off. By the time the second season aired in 2014, social media had transformed everyone into Valerie Cherish — the aspiring superstar — and the series adapted its satire to fit this new landscape.

Now, twelve years later, The Comeback has returned for its third and final season. As with its previous seasons, it offers a timely and incisive critique of the current state of show business. Hollywood has become increasingly absurd in the age of A.I., and The Comeback season 3 delivers just the satire the industry requires at this moment.

The Comeback Season 3 Addresses The Rise Of A.I. In The Film & TV Industry

As season three of The Comeback begins, Valerie is once again pursuing her next fix of fame. After using a positive COVID test to escape a Broadway commitment, she is offered a chance to star in a new multi-camera sitcom on an emerging streaming service. The only catch is that it’s being written by A.I.

The fictional show-within-a-show accurately reflects the kind of bland, formulaic sitcom that an A.I. chatbot might produce. From its vague title to its fill-in-the-blank premise, How’s That?! is a derivative mix of all the tired tropes that A.I. would generate from a “Create a hit sitcom” prompt.

The rise of A.I. poses an increasingly significant issue in the film and TV industry. Digital creations like Tilly Norwood threaten to replace real human actors, while ChatGPT aims at taking jobs from living screenwriters. This situation presents an existential threat to storytelling as an art form, and The Comeback season 3 utilizes storytelling to counteract this trend.

The Comeback Season 3 Takes Place Against The Backdrop Of The 2023 Strikes

The first two seasons of The Comeback were set around their original airing times, but season three is specifically situated during the Hollywood strikes of 2023. This setting showcases Valerie’s most attention-seeking traits — she appears on picket lines only to mingle with celebrities and capture photos for social media — while also providing an ideal historical backdrop for this narrative.

A.I. was a major point of contention during the 2023 strikes. Studios delayed negotiations with unions as long as possible, hoping that striking workers would eventually compromise their principles out of desperation. For SAG-AFTRA, safeguarding human actors against the encroaching influence of A.I. was perhaps the most crucial battle during the strike.

This makes Valerie’s transition from picket lines to meetings with a streamer interested in casting her in an A.I.-generated sitcom hilariously hypocritical. It creates a comedic dilemma for her character: she must choose between her artistic integrity and her desire for fame. Naturally, being Valerie Cherish, she opts for fame almost immediately (after consulting Alexa about A.I.’s ethics in a humorous low-key gag).

Each decade when it returns for a new season, The Comeback refreshes its premise to reflect the current media landscape. In its inaugural season, it was a mockumentary featuring a reality TV crew following Valerie around. Season two made slight adjustments, showcasing an unsuccessful reality show pilot repurposed as a documentary film about Valerie’s new role as a fictionalized version of herself on a prestigious HBO drama titled Seeing Red.

Season three updates the show’s format yet again. Valerie is no longer followed by a traditional camera crew but instead has a social media manager filming her constantly for TikTok. This shift is a natural evolution for this satirical sitcom. It makes perfect sense that Valerie Cherish in 2026 (or 2023 within the show’s timeline) would be plastering her face all over TikTok in her desperate attempt to remain relevant, providing Kudrow with fresh comedic opportunities.

Ella Stiller joins the cast as Valerie’s social media manager Patience and proves to be an excellent addition to the series. Stiller serves as a hilarious deadpan counterpart to Kudrow, perfectly pairing Patience’s Gen Z sensibility with Valerie’s Gen X attitude.

Fortunately, while A.I.-generated sitcoms are still hypothetical at this point, it may not be long before they become reality. It’s only a matter of time before one of these content-starved streaming services decides to greenlight an entire show written by Sora or ChatGPT or another formidable chatbot, leading us into uncharted territory.

The portrayal of an A.I.-generated TV show within The Comeback is both frightening and humorous. It’s amusing because it seems absurd to hire artists to breathe life into words crafted by soulless machines, yet it’s also concerning because Hollywood may soon normalize terms like “A.I.” and “human showrunners” within just a few years.