Akash and I just finished The Comeback and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the main character, Valerie Cherish.
Not because of what she teaches us. Because of what she asks of us.
She’s a faded sitcom actress clawing her way back to relevance in early 2000s Hollywood, with a camera crew following her everywhere and almost no self-awareness about what any of it looks like. She craves validation so visibly it makes you wince. She inserts herself into rooms she wasn’t invited to. She talks over people, misreads cues, overstays her welcome, and has weaponized the phrase “I need to know I’m being heard” into a kind of self-protective armor she deploys at the exact wrong moments.
The show is designed to make you cringe. And it works.
But here’s what I kept noticing: every time I wanted to look away, something was also keeping me there. Not despite the discomfort…because of it. Valerie is completely, painfully exposed. The need is right on the surface. The gap between how she sees herself and how she’s landing is enormous, and she can feel it, and she keeps going anyway. I don’t think Valerie is delusional. I actually see in her a particular kind of courage most of us never have to show because we’ve gotten very good at managing our exposure.
The question the show asks is whether you can hold all of that at once. The cringe and the commitment. The need and the nerve. Without collapsing one into the other…without deciding she’s just sad, or deciding the persistence redeems everything, or looking away until she earns a more comfortable version of your attention.
That’s genuinely hard. And it’s what real engagement with another person requires.
Because here’s the thing: everyone is Valerie in some room, in some relationship, at some point. The need is universal. The gap is universal. Most people just have better lighting and no camera crew. The ones who seem clean and self-possessed have usually just learned which rooms to avoid and which parts to hide. That’s not wholeness. That’s management.
What Valerie won’t let you do…what the show won’t let you do…is stay comfortable. You have to decide, over and over, whether you’re in or out. Whether you can stay present with someone who is messy and trying and not quite landing, without reducing them to the mess.
That’s the ask. And it’s right there to be answered, not just while watching this show, but in any relationship worth having.
