NÃO PERCA: ‘The Comeback’ Star and EP Dan Bucatinsky On The “Uncomfortable” Nature Of Playing A Heightened Version Of Yourself On TV 🍿
Among HBO’s many cult comedy hits, The Comeback — about a goofy, out-of-touch former sitcom star named Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow, who also co-created the show with Michael Patrick King) — is one of the cultiest: cancelled after its first season in 2005, but brought back for a second in 2014, all supported by a vocal fandom of tastemakers keeping its flame alive on social media. Through Valerie’s many humiliations and occasional successes, she’s been buoyed by the members of her inner circle, including publicist Billy Stanton, played by her producing partner Dan Bucatinsky (also an executive producer on The Comeback).
In the show’s hotly anticipated third season, premiering on HBO this evening, Valerie has a tougher assignment than being the one veteran star among newcomers on disposable sex-com Room & Bored (as in Season 1) or playing a sometimes literal monster on a dark dramedy about the MAKING of Room & Bored (as in Season 2): now, she’s been tapped to headline network television’s first-ever AI-written sitcom, How’s That?. Though Valerie knows that AI was “the villain” of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023, she’s convinced to do it by her now-manager Billy; after all, a multi-cam sitcom is more in her wheelhouse than some of the other gigs Billy’s gotten for her lately….
Decider spoke to Bucatinsky this week about premiering the new season at the South By Southwest Festival, the new cast members filling out Valerie’s new chapter, and how Valerie’s most controversial move yet helps boost Billy to a new perch in the industry.
DECIDER: You were just at South by Southwest premiering the show. How did it go?
DAN BUCATINSKY: Oh, my God, what a pleasure. There was a feeling from everybody there, both the crowds that came to our premiere and also to the press that we got to talk to, that the show was beloved and was eagerly anticipated, and it doesn’t always feel that way when you’re doing a brand-new show and people have no idea what they’re headed to. It was a very warm reception and we had a great time. It was also great to hang out with the cast.
Who all was there?
Obviously, Lisa and Michael and myself, but our other EP, John Melfi, was there, the whole HBO team that was so supportive of us from the very beginning, and then Laura Silverman, who plays Jane; and Damian Young, who plays Mark; and Ella Stiller, who is new this season to our show, playing Patience; and the wonderful four-time Tony-winning director, Jack O’Brien, who’s joined our cast as an actor this season as Tommy [a hairdresser Valerie worked with on her long-ago breakout sitcom, I’m It!].
I was surprised that this was his first screen credit. How did the producing team know he would be right to play Tommy?
Listen, Michael Patrick King has an unbelievable intuition. He’s always wanted to populate The Comeback with people around Valerie who seem like real people, who seem like the people that they are. After 22 years, some of the people who started out less known have become more known, but for the most part, Michael really loves to populate the show with people that we maybe haven’t seen before. And he had been watching an interview of Jack O’Brien’s on YouTube and was like, “Oh my God, this man, this man’s personality, this man’s essence is exactly who this character is,” and so he sought him out.
And by the way, Mickey [Valerie’s longtime hairdresser and best friend], beloved Mickey, Robert Michael Morris, who we lost in 2017 and was ill when we were shooting Season 2: he was Michael’s old acting teacher. He wasn’t even working in the industry at the time, and Michael had him in his head when he was thinking about Mickey. So it was a perfect casting in both cases.
What was it like to incorporate Ella and all of the new younger comedy performers — John Early, Abbi Jacobson, Benito Skinner, among others?
Well, I’ve known Ella since she was five. One of my best friends is her mom, so for me to have Ella now as a 23-year-old on set with me every day, it was a very special bond the two of us have had and will have forever as a result. And Ella’s in all the episodes, so she was with us all the time. I’m a big fan of John Early’s, and John Early has been a fan of The Comeback since he was at NYU.
True story: years ago, I was at a pay phone — this will tell you how long ago it was because there were pay phones — in New York City, I think on the phone with Lisa, calling our office back when we had an office. John Early came up behind me and was like, “Oh my God, I’m a huge fan of The Comeback.” And he was, what, 19, 20, 22? What a full circle moment when I saw him on set. And I’m a fan of his and he obviously of the show, but what a great thrill for him — who had a poster of Valerie Cherish, I think, in his college dorm room — to be able to join our cast.
And Abbi Jacobson: again, these are just great additions. They have great comedic instincts, Benito as well. So I was really thrilled to let them all enter into the fabric of the making of How’s That? in such a perfect way, as well as the cast of How’s That? I’ve known Zane Phillips for a long time and he was on Mid-Century Modern, a show I was a writer on. Such a great guy. And Brittany [O’Grady], and of course Tim Bagley is a legend, and Matt Cook, who just was in Season 2 playing his own twin, and now he is so brilliant in Season 3. We all really enjoyed bringing so many interesting comedic points of view into the show.
Tim and Matt are both former Groundlings, like you and Lisa. Benito and Abbi and John are all creators and writers as well. What’s it like integrating people to the cast who are known for creating their own characters on other projects?
I don’t think I’ve ever thought about it quite that way. If you’re a multi-hyphenate, you’re putting on the hat that you’re wearing in that moment. When you’re in the cast of The Comeback, your job in that moment is to be in the cast of The Comeback. Everybody was very good at staying in that lane and being who they need to be for Valerie, because the show, regardless of how many worlds she enters, is told from her point of view.
The only ones who really have to juggle a lot of hat-wearing in the moment every day are Michael and Lisa who wrote the show, conceived the show from the beginning together, and wrote every episode of Season 3 together. So there would be writing conversations that would happen between director and actress where the collaborator writers would be on set talking, and then go back to being director and actress.
The other thing is that Michael comes from comedy. He was a standup. He’s a brilliant, funny performer in his roots, so he’s open to conversation. And the show is written, absolutely. People ask this all the time: “Is The Comeback improvised at all?” No, every breath, every “um,” everything is written, because so much of the writing process involves Lisa improvising in the writers’ room as Valerie, and then taking down the things that are working, and so that becomes the script. But she’s also able to do that as the other characters, which is amazing. Occasionally, if there’s a funny pitch to say something else, it’s great to have funny, creative people who are able to throw that into the mix.
We definitely see that this season, how a scene has to evolve as audience feedback comes through, and how the AI writing process isn’t really useful for that.
Yeah. I’m very proud of Michael and Lisa. The show has inadvertently become this three-act time capsule of our industry over 22 years, and our tour guide through the changes in the world and in her marriage and her career, and also in our industry, is Valerie Cherish. But they did it this season with the big bad wolf being AI, and the fear of it, but they did it without an agenda. They’re reporting on the reality of what is, and what the challenges might be of having AI write something, but also what the benefits are. I was delighted in how even-handed they expressed it: look, this may be a part of our reality, like touchscreens are at airports. We might have to just experience and learn to adapt and work with the ways in which technology may be useful and what ways it’s not useful, and to that end, I feel like it’s a very current guide to what may be our reality.
I love the log line on the poster this season, which is “It’s time to face reality,” because we started Season 1 with Valerie Cherish accepting this task of being on a reality show. Reality shows, at that time — and I remember it distinctly — were the big bad wolf. “It’s going to kill writers’ careers because it’s just going to take over.” And as it turns out, it did cut down on the real estate there was in primetime, but it didn’t destroy the industry, and other things emerged as a result of it. So it’ll be interesting to see how we learn to live with the realities of AI, and also in what ways the challenges of it and the scary parts of it lead us to be more creative in different ways that we haven’t even thought of.
Every time you or Lisa or Michael gets interviewed, you’ve been asked when The Comeback is getting a third season. Did the AI through line come first, or was it, “We’re going to come back and we’ll see what we want to do this time”?
It’s like this. There’s never a time when we’re all together — or certainly when Michael and Lisa get together for a lunch over the years — where they’re not like, “What do you think Val’s up to these days?” And the truth of the matter is the idea of Valerie being on Broadway has been something we’ve talked about for years. How delightful it is to see Valerie in rehearsal for a Broadway show. That idea has lived in our consciousness for over a decade, but is it a big enough story? Can you sustain a season around that? No.
So yes, we would be asked all the time, any chance of a third season of The Comeback? And we would always say, “You never know. You never know.” It just depends on whether we find the idea, something big enough, scary enough, challenging enough that would sustain a season.
And what was so interesting about the AI question — “What would happen if…?” — is that I think it started when Lisa was lamenting what a bummer it was that we couldn’t see Valerie in the strikes, what Valerie would be like on the picket line. And so that led to what’s the big threat that came out of the strikes — that three years from the strikes, which is now, we will have to be in negotiations about again? The reason why is because of AI, and that’s when they were like, what if Valerie gets offered the first AI sitcom, and the two of them locked eyes and were like, “That’s an incredible idea.”
That idea came to them over a year ago, maybe even two years ago. But the idea was so compelling, it stayed with them. And when the opportunity to mention it to HBO came, HBO was like, “If you do it, you’ve got to do it right now, because that idea is right now.” And thankfully, we did. They wrote every episode over the summer. We started shooting in August, we wrapped in November, cut them through February, and here we are bearing on March 22nd.
It could not be more timely right now. Right before we got on this call, I was reading about the AI Andy Cohen that is going to be guiding users through Bravo content on Peacock.
There are some moments in there, without giving it away, that are really fun, where we are speculating about what it’s like to look at an AI version of Valerie Cherish and what she’s able to do. And oh my God, to read that thing about Andy Cohen, I was like, “We were absolutely dead on.”
Do you think there are sitcoms right now that are secretly being written by AI?
I don’t believe so. According to the current Writers Guild’s contract that we’re all working under, there are no shows right now on the air that could have gone forward without writers. And in fact, even on our show, we’re not saying that we don’t need writers. The role of the writer is the question of the story.
And by the way, the relationship of Valerie Cherish to Paulie G in Season 1, if we go back to it, it had everything to do with Paulie’s absolute panic that this woman was bringing a reality show onto a sitcom that he was writing and creating, and the threat he perceived her to be. The threat writers feel AI is — that’s very similar to the threat writers felt reality television was going to be.
Billy doesn’t seem concerned about it at all, though. This is Billy’s big chance.
Billy doesn’t seem concerned about it at all. Billy really is a victim of opportunity. Listen, you know how psyched Billy was, I’m sure, when he got the call that they wanted Valerie to be on The Traitors? What a great gig he was able to get for her as her now manager. Billy has been in Valerie’s life for 20 years and devoted to her and chasing opportunity, and there’s a kind of fervor, desperation, social climbing — rage is the only way to describe it. That is the person we met in Season 1 who would shove anybody who would say something he didn’t like, and the person in Season 2 who was willing to quit when he felt disrespected. There’s the inner child of Billy that becomes visible for the audience in these delicious moments in the past.
The journey of Billy in Season 3 is really the manifestation of who he was before, and this opportunity now to be what he thinks he should have been all along. And again, without giving away too much, I think Billy has been wondering, “What about me?” The “what about me?” of it all has been irking him probably for over a decade, and he has an opportunity now to get billing equal to Valerie’s and to capitalize on it, and show it off in his fashion.
Billy does take some big swings with his look this season. How much input did you get to have on Billy’s style?
I had some. It was written into the script that he was wearing Thom Browne suits, skirts. What I loved about it is that it’s so just behind the time. The Thom Browne explosion of those men’s skirts was a few years ago, and I love that Billy feels like he’s being right now by spending a fortune on full looks because now he wants to be looked at in a different way, he wants to be seen and heard in a different way. It’s all part of this thing that Lisa has said a few times, which I just love: now, in the present, everybody has become Valerie Cherish, and it really is one of the themes of our season.
Back in Season 1, Valerie needed a reality crew to be hired and to hire her, to follow her around in order to have that level of visibility and notoriety and being seen and heard. Now it’s 22 years later, and every human on the planet has a phone that allows them to document every moment of their lives, every thought, every cappuccino, every workout. We have all become Valerie Cherish, and Billy is no exception.
You are an executive producer. You also play two different executive producers on TV — here and as Rob on Hacks. Which of those is closer to your lived experience?
Oh, that’s for sure Rob on Hacks. Rob is good at his job and diligent and knows how to keep the trains running on time as best he can. It was such a blast to work on Season 4 of Hacks. That was such a treat. But Rob was good at his job and responsible and was a family man. I think that version of an EP is a little closer to what I’m familiar with, because I have a sense of responsibility and creative diligence such that it was hard for me to embrace this idea that Billy is an EP and not necessarily pulling all of his weight as he should. It was fun to play, but it also made me feel uncomfortable because I wanted Valerie to have a true partner, and Billy was dropping the ball, especially when cameras were on him.
This was just in The New Yorker, so I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that Valerie’s new show shoots on the Friends stage at the Warner Bros. lot. Were there conversations about not including that reference in the show?
Yeah. I think that Lisa and Michael talked a lot about how far they can push that particular fact. It was really poetic that we had the opportunity to shoot on Stage 24. I think we also shot some of the pilot of The Comeback on Stage 10 at Warner Bros., which became the set of Valerie and Mark’s condo this season. So Lisa and I started our company back in 2003 on the Warner Bros. lot in visible distance from our stages, and there was something just lovely about being at Warner Bros. for the three months that we were shooting.
I think it was very clear that at no point does Valerie ever mention Lisa Kudrow, obviously, or Friends. I think the word “Friends” doesn’t come out of her mouth completely. It almost does when she’s listing off all the pilots that Jimmy Burrows had directed. It was such a funny wink to have Valerie positing that maybe How’s That? could be the one big TV hit for Stage 24, just as the camera is landing on the fact that there already was a giant comedy hit on Stage 24. That was fun for us to play without being too self-referential.
Valerie’s always made such a to-do of welcome gifts and wrap gifts for her colleagues. Is this something that puts pressure on you as a real person when you work on a show like this?
I’ve always been a bit of a wrap and start gifter anyway, so no. Valerie definitely loves it, and in season one, she’s got those keychains that she does, and in Season 3, it’s all about these candles, which is so brilliant and so fun. I always give a lot of thought to these kinds of things, just because I’m a huge sentimental sap, so I’ve always done that on my own.
Have you received any that are particularly memorable?
I have received some lovely start gifts over the years, engraved items with the dates on them, and the things that you can keep forever as keepsakes have always been the stuff that I’ve loved. For Michael and for Lisa this year, I found two moments in the script that were so beautifully written, and I had those pages shrunk and put into these little glass paperweights. To me, that was meaningful to give to them because I wanted them to know how much I loved their collaboration and the writing of this season. That was something that I really enjoyed doing.
That’s great.
Very easy to do, by the way, so anyone out there looking for a good gift: you can take a paper anything and put it inside glass and it makes a great paperweight.
A lot of Season 3 can feel terrifying and bleak. Do you share Valerie’s optimism in the end?
I do. I have to tell you the truth, that ever since Season 1, people have had difficulty watching The Comeback and feeling sorry for Valerie, feeling like it’s so cringey: I’m like, “It’s only cringey because you’re having feelings, because you’re over-identifying with how that would make you feel, but Valerie is a hero.” She is able to bounce back in a way that I’ve never seen anyone do. It’s what we all should aspire to be: somebody who, regardless of your setbacks, is able to pivot, able to adapt, able to bounce back or recover. That’s something Valerie’s been able to do. Valerie’s optimism, her ability to turn a narrative toward the positive, is so admirable. It really inspires me.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.
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