Review: The Comeback, “Valerie Lights a Candle” | Season 3, Episode 5

Last month, Kirk Acevedo appeared on Ryan M. Perez’s podcast “An Actor Despairs” to speak about the reality of working as a middle-class actor in Hollywood. In the wake of the pandemic, he points out, he and many other actors have had to sell their houses; there are fewer roles to choose from these days, and TV actors are competing with Oscar winners. More and more performers are becoming comfortable with acknowledging these basic facts—including Sterling K. Brown, whose Instagram comment about streamers’ shortened episode counts went viral this month. There’s a sense right now in Hollywood that all of this has become completely unsustainable. Something has to break.

Several series have capably satirized the current state of the industry—again, The Other Two is a personal favorite, and I wish we could’ve seen that show’s take on AI—but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen one that captured this deep state of malaise like The Comeback. Seasons one and two were even darker, yes: we saw Valerie Cherish frequently turn into the worst version of herself out of the aching need for validation and accolades, first riding the early reality TV wave and then making a more serious name for herself on an early-2010s gritty prestige drama series. But now Val is a little more even-keeled, and instead the desperation has seeped outward to control basically everyone on screen. Everybody working on How’s That?! is afraid of getting fired, from the actors to the writers to the director to the casting director, but the system doesn’t care. In fact, exec Brandon Wallick (captured in such exquisite, slimy detail by Andrew Scott) isn’t worried at all about any of this. If it doesn’t work out, he can probably just bin the show and treat it as a tax write-off.