10 Shows Like 'The Comeback' You Should Watch Next
Valerie Cherish is back, and not a moment too soon.
Twenty years after a modestly rated but absolutely brilliant first season, mega-cringe Hollywood satire The Comeback has returned to HBO for one more painfully embarrassing season (complimentary) Co-created by and starring Lisa Kudrow, it's the hilarious, dark, and occasionally moving story of a C-list celebrity determined to stay in the limelight at whatever cost.
Valerie Cherish—clueless, egotistical, and all-too-human—is one of TV's indelible characters, simultaneously a victim of ageism, misogyny, and celebrity culture, and also a woman who doesn't care about any of that provided she can find a way to scrabble to the top.
Likewise, these 10 shows spotlight women (mostly) of a certain age navigating career challenges with…mixed results.
On the surface, Valerie Cherish and Deborah Vance don't have all that much in common, but they often feel like two sides of a coin in the ways in which they battle, and concede to, the pressures of being a woman in modern show business.
Hacks finds 25-year-old writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) struggling to get her career back one track after getting cancelled over a tweet.
She reluctantly takes a job with Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a comedy trailblazer who remains popular with an older Vegas crown, but whose career is largely on autopilot.
They're an entirely mismatched pair, but their chemistry is ultimately explosive, with Jean Smart doing some of the best work of her incredible career as the often deeply unlikeable Vance, and Einbinder more than holding her own in return.
It's funny, bitchy, and surprisingly moving when it wants to be.
Stream Hacks on HBO Max .
The premise is very much about a comeback: A very ‘90s group (Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, Paula Pell, and Renée Elise Goldsberry) who made it big very briefly with exactly one hit song gets its own shot at a career resurgence (they’re Girls5eva because they expected to be in the game “longer than 4 ever”—turned out, not so much; also there used to be a fifth member, but she died in a tragic infinity pool accident).
After an up-and-coming rapper samples one of their old hits, the band reunites to try to find new relevancy in the 2020s.
It doesn't go great!
Tina Fey is one of the executive producers, and the (very fun) '90s-inspired original music was composed and written for the show by the creators.
Stream Girls5Eva on Peacock and Netflix .
