Lisa Kudrow has taken her final bow as Valerie Cherish. How’s that?! The Comeback series finale aired on HBO on Sunday, May 10, concluding Valerie’s AI battle. The series, created by Kudrow and Michael Patrick King in the early 2000s, was canceled and came back for Season 2 about 10 years later. Another decade after that, the comedy came back for one last run.
Dan Bucatinsky has played Billy, Valerie’s talent manager, in every season. He tells TV Insider what it was like to film his final scene with Kudrow. Warning: The Comeback series finale spoilers ahead!
How did The Comeback finale end?
Erin Simkin / HBO
Valerie had to put out all of the AI-generated fires, so to speak, in the finale. After How’s That?! got renewed for Season 2, she was eager to be a team player with the NuNet bigwig, Brandon Wallick (Andrew Scott). He asked her to partake in a press conference to announce the renewal, which powerful showrunners in the industry saw as the beginning of the end of writing jobs in Hollywood. Bradley Whitford returned as showrunner Jack Stevens, who, alongside Adam Scott and Justin Theroux‘s showrunner characters, asked Valerie to take a stand against AI by refusing to do the press conference.
Valerie did the presser, but she strayed from Brandon’s AI-positive messaging when he insulted the art of sitcoms. He said it was the cheap programming that kept NuNet running so that more important dramas could come in. The so-called more important shows wouldn’t use AI. Valerie didn’t like that.
Valerie said that the AI writing program was a useful tool, but that it could never do the real artistic work of humans. She told the story of how their AI tech guy, Evan (Julian Stern, Kudrow’s son), stepped in and wrote for How’s That?! when the AI program hit a paywall, blocking them from using it.
Valerie’s public support of writers pleased Jack, who offered her a role in a new drama series he was writing. The end credits revealed that the drama series and Valerie all earned Emmy nominations.
How did The Comeback end for Dan Bucatinsky’s Billy?
Erin Simkin / HBO
Earlier on, Billy met Valerie on set to tell her that he couldn’t be in L.A. for an important week on the show. His bold fashion moment on the How’s That?! step and repeat (a.k.a. fake premiere) caught a designer’s eye, and Billy was invited to attend a fashion show in New York. He chose to chase that opportunity because of the others it could bring, because he wants to be a star in his own right.
Valerie and Billy shared a tender moment when she asked, “Do I have a manager anymore?” and Billy said no. They got teary-eyed as they said it was their last day working together. You could tell that no acting was involved here for Kudrow and Bucatinsky. Bucatinsky says filming this scene was “emotional.”
“I’m a crier anyway, so everything makes me emotional,” he says. Getting to bring out Billy’s vulnerability was meaningful for the Scandal alum, despite Billy’s “drive this season that is really unrelenting.”
“What I really loved was getting the opportunity to have conflict with Valerie,” he goes on. “Lisa and I have been friends for a very, very long time. But to have these scenes, every other season, for the most part, Billy is just her cheerleader, part of her inner circle, her support. And this season, he’s a disappointment over and over and over again, and he feels it. He feels like he’s disappointing his own family. And to play that was challenging and at times really emotional.”
Bucatinsky says that it was a powerful thing to know that this was their final scene as Billy and Valerie. (Kudrow previously stated that The Comeback is a trilogy, and they don’t intend to make a Season 4.)
“At the end, when Valerie turns to Billy and says, ‘Do I have a manager anymore?’ It was right near the end,” Bucatinsky says. “I think we were shooting in the last couple of days of our whole series, so all of it was fraught with so much emotion. Lisa and I will be friends forever, and hopefully we’ll work on stuff, and we will continue to work on stuff forever. But this was the last time that we were going to be on camera together as Billy and Valerie, and I definitely felt it. I know she felt it, and it was moving.”
While a difficult moment for Billy and Valerie, Bucatinsky says it was a necessary one.
“I’m glad I was with her because she’s a pal and we support each other,” he explains, “but I definitely think that while Billy also felt a little bit like, oh, I’m letting go of somebody as close to family as Billy probably knows, I’m also being set free. And that was an emotional moment.”
The Comeback, Streaming on HBO Max