TV Watch: "The Comeback" comes around to a question similar to one being played out in "Mad Men" -- a question of humiliation

Valerie (Lisa Kudrow) and her nemesis Paulie G (Lance Barber) on the set of Seeing Red, in The Comeback

by Ken

Since I last wrote (briefly) about the resuscitated season of The Comeback last week, a couple of things have happened. First, I thought of a possible factor in my confessed reluctance to abandon the show, even though I haven't really enjoyed it, and second, we've gotten the extra-long finale.

You recall the premise. The original Comeback, as created and written by Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, had Kudrow as TV actress Valerie Cherish making what now turns out to be the first of her comebacks. Many years after she actually did star in a sitcom, only to sink into show-biz obscurity, Valerie was cast in the hideous role of "Aunt Sassy" in a mindless sitcom called Room and Bored, about a bunch of spunky young roommates who were exceedingly pretty (yes, the boy, Chris, was also exceedingly pretty) and not much else that I could see.

It was a show with no other discernible ambitions, and Valerie's role was so marginal that we never found out whether she might have improved it in any way if she had been treated with any respect. Which, by the way, she wasn't. At the same time there was some sort of reality show being made about Valerie's comeback, called (quaintly) The Comeback. This was a hideously intrusive as well as uninteresting plot line -- made even more uninteresting by Valerie herself being so unsympathetic and uninteresting. Comedy gold!

I honestly remember very little about that ancient season of The Comeback, so I don't have a complete perspective on Valerie's new Comeback, a bunch of years after the general disaster, at least for Valerie, of both Room and Bored and her reality show, which seems to have portrayed her even more unsympathetically than she deserved.

Now, these however-many years later, Valerie's second comeback is an almost unrelieved nightmare. One of the creator-writers of Room and Bored, Paulie G, has gotten a green light from HBO for a series, Seeing Red, which is Paulie's psychotic version of the Room and Bored experience. Though he admits that he was on heroin the whole time, his considered version of the experience is that poor nebbishy Valerie was the devil, the cause of every problem in his life, and his entire purpose in creating Seeing Red is to get even, and by casting Valerie as his "Valerie" character, to torment her as unrelentingly as the code of Hollywood behavior (which seems to be that there isn't one, except not to get caught) allows. And oh yes, yet another reality show is being made simultaneously, and it's just as intrusive and just as uninteresting and annoying as the old one -- and even more disruptive to Valerie's life, pushing her husband Mark to wonder what there is left to hold onto in his marriage.

And this is the factor that I realized I had left out of my last piece: that one thing that kept me coming back this season was to see how much humiliation Valerie would finally be made to absorb. Or, more accurately, how that humiliation level would rank alongside the level of humiliation she deserved. On Seeing Red, she is in fact a near-model colleague, attempting to be professional and supportive of her colleagues and a real team player, even as she is being subjected to some truly inhuman humiliations, like being forced to give the Paulie G character -- played with an unconscionable amount of charm by Seth Rogen, even though the real Paule G is uttterly devoid of charm -- a blowjob. More comedy gold!

I'm thinking, then, that what kept me coming back was the question of whether the level of humiliation Valerie endures this time is greater than, equal to, or less than the level she deserves. It sure looked like even for a character as vapid as Valerie, the universe was coming down awfully hard on her.

And in the end, Valerie came out sort of okay. When Seeing Red finally began to air, the unrelenting punishment Valerie absorbed apparently came across to viewers as some sort of heroic performance, which of course in a sense it was. It even garnered Valerie a best supporting actress Emmy nomination, even as the show itself wasn't especially enthusiastically received -- a triumph of sorts for Valerie over Paulie G.

I've left out all sorts of other circumstances and complications (including plotlets involving two of her old Room and Bored castmates) to focus on this degree-of-humiliation, and the finale managed to make more of them than I would have thought possible, and even suggested that Valerie might be able to pull some of the wreckage of her life back together.

I don't know that it adds up to much, or even anything, but there was something going on here, and that something was something more than I was expecting -- though I do think the something has to do with that question of how did the suffering Valerie endured measure up to the amount she deserved.

And as I thought about it, it occurred to me that this has also been a central theme of the still-uncompleted final season of Mad Men, where Don Draper, admittedly a much more intteresting character than Valerie, though at this point perhaps not a whole lot more sympathetic, is having to find out himself how great a price he has to pay, or if there's any amount he can pay, to get a fair shake from the people in his life, in particular his professional life, where he left him being subjected to abject humiliation by people just aren't in his league ability-wise.

Going into this final season, I assumed we were going to see Don at rock bottom after last season's downward spiral. In fact, we've seen him get at least his professional act together, only to find that it doesn't seem to make a difference. I wasn't all that curious to see how Valerie would come out of her period of rock-bottomness in The Comeback, and was surprised to find the answer more interesting than seemed likely. I'm a whole lot more curious to see how life works out for Don.

#