This… is Valerie Cherish’s “Comeback”!
HBO’s cult-comedy “The Comeback” — the brainchild of Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King — returned Sunday with a half-hour premiere that placed Val and her eccentricities squarely in the here and now. And Mickey Deane, Val’s longtime hairdresser and best friend, is gone, but not forgotten in Sunday’s Season 3 premiere. (Actor Robert Michael Morris sadly died in 2017 at the age of 77.)
In the opening Broadway sequence, we see an 8×10 photo of Mickey leaning against the mirror in Val’s dressing room — a subtle nod that shows that Val always carries him with her. But later in the episode when Val clocks in for her totally-not-a-day-player role on an indie film, she runs into Tommy Tomlin (Tony-winning director Jack O’Brien), a man she formerly worked with on “I’m It.” After Tommy agrees to do her hair, Valerie reveals that Mickey didn’t die from his cancer, but rather, he succumbed to the first round of COVID-19 that hit in 2020. According to Kudrow and King, more references to Morris’ character will be sprinkled in throughout the season.
At a press conference held Thursday, King said Kudrow “couldn’t even entertain” the idea of coming back for Season 2 following Morris’ death. She eventually came around to continuing Val’s story.
“[Morris] went from obscurity to, when he died, the Entertainment Weekly headline of the article said, ‘Television Star Robert Michael Morris Dead,’” King told members of the press. “I always got this great happiness about the fact that in that moment, he was called a television star, which is something he would have loved.
“Then when we came up with the idea that maybe, because [Mickey’s death] happened off camera, off stage for the audience, maybe Valerie hadn’t dealt with it. And Lisa has a very good understanding of what Valerie does or does not want to deal with. So that became a story, and the idea is that she can’t find his ashes,” he teased. “But the one thing in the writing room Lisa kept repeating over and over again, which is going to make me cry, is that Valerie designed the box. She had enough of a connection to celebrate him at the end, even though she then immediately put it away.”