The third (and final) installment of this Hollywood satire finds C-lister Valerie Cherish (Lisa Kudrow) helming an AI-written show.
Consider Valerie Cherish, the perennially desperate-to-be-seen, desperate-to-be-loved Hollywood C-lister played by Lisa Kudrow. Valerie, bless her, reenters our collective lives once every decade, like the census.
And like the census, her return always assumes the form of an appraisal, a ruthless and clear-eyed taking of stock. In's original 2005 season, Valerie donned a cupcake costume and pratfalled her way through the rise of reality television, starring in both a corny sitcom and its making-of documentary. In 2014, a second season found Valerie headlining a prestige HBO series about that sitcom, auguring the fusillade of high-end, self-satisfied streaming dramedies that were about to pummel an unsuspecting populace into submission. In this third season, she's still out here hustling. Sure, she's got an Emmy under her belt, and she's been booked and busy, but there are signs of trouble — she and her husband have downsized from their Brentwood mansion to a West Hollywood apartment. Her publicist-turned-manager seems even more checked out than baseline. She's hired a social media consultant and has even started … aAs we meet her, she's older, wiser but still essentially Valerie: Blithely optimistic, hungrily opportunistic. She's still desperate for attention — but the precise nature of the attention she's craving these days has subtly but significantly shifted. It's no longer enough for Valerie to be seen; now, she wants — expects,She remains ridiculous, thank God. And Kudrow once again imbues her with the physicality that has come to define Valerie's essential self: She's still going through life nodding like a bobblehead, still punctuating just about every sentence with a"right?" or a"yeah?" or a"y'know?," because it's a learned response. If the world refuses to affirm her in any way — and somehow it continues to find endlessly novel ways to do just that — then she'll just affirm her own darn self, yeah? Right? But something happens in the first episode of the new season that efficiently signals how much has changed for Valerie. The setup is classicversion"). Rehearsal isn't going great — her director and fellow dancers are mean, catty and dismissive .'s previous seasons. She doesn't chirpily ignore their insults and blithely soldier on. She doesn't try to excuse and minimize their bad behavior so she can take advantage of the opportunity they're affording her. No, she calls them out, and she quits. , she seeks assurances that actual writers will be involved , and she steps up as the show's executive producer as soon as it becomes clear she's the only one involved who cares about the cast, the crew and the quality of the show itself.There remain plenty of opportunities for Kudrow to make us laugh at Valerie, but as the season progresses, we find ourselves rooting for her more than ever. That's because Kudrow has altered Valerie's fuel mixture a bit. She's always been acutely self-aware, she's always known when she's being disrespected, but the Valerie of seasons one and two was perfectly content to swallow other people's low opinions of her if it meant she got some time in the spotlight. Now, that self-awareness is matched to something besides her default, pathologically sunny perseverance; it's married to defiance, and to action. She stands her ground against a costume designer who sees her as camp and nothing more . She agrees to play nice with a network executive until she, very publicly, doesn't. And when her dour husband starts flailing on his own reality show, Valerie draws on her vast reserves of experience on both sides of the camera to show him how it's done. But a self-actualized Valerie affects the show's comedic chemistry, and there are times when the season can't quite manage to sustain its satiric bite. On two occasions, the show's pitched disdain for Hollywood phoniness and hollow ambition falters, and something akin to sincerity peeks out from behind the mask. In one, a beloved real-life Hollywood comedy legend delivers a short monologue to Valerie about why AI can never replace's first season returns simply to assure Valerie that she is a good person, a wonderful person, and that she is in no way in the wrong. On both occasions, seasoned viewers will be patiently but eagerly awaiting the turn, the rug-pull, the reveal that such abject, wet-eyed earnestness will of course get swatted down, because this is. But the turn never comes, the rug remains firmly in place and we are left to grapple with the knowledge that we've just been exposed to the creators' true intent, delivered with a gravid plainness, without anything even resembling the gimlet-eyed take we've come to, well … cherish. But you know what? Fine. Who knows if Valerie will return in ten years' time to once again Cassandra us all about the state of the entertainment industry? Who knows, in point of fact, if there'll be an entertainment industry for her to return to? I forgave those moments of uncharacteristic ingenuousness because I managed to convince myself they felt valedictory, triumphant — a few discordant bars within Valerie Cherish's swan song.Glen Weldon is a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. He reviews books, movies, comics and more for the NPR Arts Desk.KPBS keeps you informed with local stories you need to know about — with no paywall. Our news is free for everyone because people like you help fund it.
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