Meta(morphosis): A Look at THE COMEBACK (Season Two)

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Welcome to a new Wildcard Wednesday! This week, I’m studying and sharing picks for the best episodic samples from the second season of HBO’s The Comeback, which returned in 2014 for eight more episodes, nine years after its 2005 debut. Though it’s still starring Lisa Kudrow, along with Robert Michael Morris, Damian Young, Laura Silverman, and Lance Barber, I decided to split up my look at this series because I consider the two seasons otherwise different – they exist within the middle of two different decades, were received differently by critics, and embody different trends associated with their respective eras. Naturally, if you haven’t already, I urge you to check out my thoughts on Season One here – a collection that got a mixed response when it premiered, I believe, because the show applied a gimmicky but complicated layering of metatheatricality into its situation for a critique of reality TV that was maybe hard to grasp (utilizing “cringe” humor before it was popular), along with a backstage showbiz premise and easy multi-cam lampoon that, at the time, felt overly familiar and uninspired.

But shortly after its cancellation, The Comeback grew in popularity and became something of a cult classic, gaining an enhanced appreciation for its thoughtful concept and its fascinating central character, brilliantly played by Lisa Kudrow. By the end of the 2000s, media outlets were reflecting on the series as one of the decade’s best. What happened? Well, although Hollywood has never given up its interest in analyzing itself, by removing the show from the specific context of 2005, it no longer got caught up in the redundant, overcrowded glut of formulaic showbiz satires with deliberately applied metatheatricality. This made the situation, overall, fresher and easier to appreciate for its unique charms. Additionally, our perception of reality TV had changed – no longer a tired fad but a major part of the media landscape (especially post-WGA strike in 2007), there was more of an understanding and thus an appetite to see it examined as a venue for produced artifice.