The Come-Back (2014 season -- Finale)

Although I am ambivalent about the season finale concluding Lisa Kudrow's eight-part HBO vehicle, The Come-Back, the show's ingenuity and artistry remain impressive.  This is one of the few television shows that looks better, and expresses more of its meanings, on second viewing.  Unlike Guillermo del Toros' horror show, The Strain, a series that stalled interminably and, then, finally lost its way completely, apparently on the basis of a budget shortfall -- the final episodes looked under-financed, the long-promised apocalypse on Manhattan was never delivered, and, in fact, the show's final shot was risible:  a couple of burning buildings, obviously inserted by CGI, over a stock image of the city skyline -- The Come-Back remained inventive (within its limited range), Kudrow's performance continued to astonish, and the final episode was both suspenseful and emotionally gripping.   The show delivers a happy ending, indeed, almost a fairy tale conclusion to the increasingly sordid and melancholy recitation of woes, most of them self-inflicted, besetting the heroine, Valerie Cherish.  Whether the cheerful denouement to all the garish humiliations tormenting Valerie Cherish, an actress who is acting at being optimistic and whose lips are continuously contorted in the rictus of a forced and ghastly smile, is persuasive to the viewer is a matter of personal preference.  On first viewing, I didn't accept the happy ending; on a second look, I was more willing to suspend my disbelief at the show's overtly audience-pleasing climax.  Cherish is doubly burdened:  she is a co-star with Seth Rogen in a HBO series (much like the show we are watching) about a middle-aged sit-com actress' come-back; at the same time, an HBO crew is shooting what was once called a "reality show" -- more pretentiously, HBO styles the show a "documentary" -- about her personal life.  The problem, of course, is that both her personal and professional life are unraveling.  The premise goes all the way back to the unfortunate Loud family, the original victims of cinema verite as "reality" programming was, then, called:  the very act of documenting real life destabilizes that life and in the PBS show, An American Family, the audience is treated to the spectacle of a family falling apart -- the son declares himself a homosexual and the parents divorce.  Although The Come-Back is scripted, the same dynamic is dramatized:  the pressure of filming in their home drives Cherish's husband out of the house and the couple are on the verge of divorce; Cherish's only loyal friend, her gay hair-dresser Mickey, is sick with cancer, and the Tv show that HBO is producing as a sit-com series with Seth Rogen, something called Seeing Red requires Cherish to subject herself to baroque humiliations:  she has to simulate oral sex with Seth Rogen, and, in one episode, spends hours locked in a car trunk in 100 degree heat while snakes are thrown on her. (Cherish is literally covered with human shit in one sequence, a kind of degradation not inflicted on royalty since Marlowe's Edward II). The question that the final show poses, and solves, is how to contrive a happy-ending out of these materials.  This is largely achieved by technical and formal means.  As the show progresses, the jerky, cinema-verite camerawork seems to become increasingly claustrophobic -- the characters are under the enormous pressure of the camera's eye at all times; they are under surveillance that becomes more and more onerous as the show proceeds.  At last, Cherish appears at the Emmy Award Show.  The images are raw, either a collage of jump-cut,short hand-held shots, too close to the actors and, sometimes, not in focus, or remote shots with code-numbers marking the edges of the view-finder.  Suddenly, Valerie breaks away from the surveillance and flees the auditorium, eluding the cameras tracking her.  Instantly, the style of film-making changes:  the shots are made with fixed cameras that no longer jerk and bobble and they have a grave, pictorial quality, a different texture and color composition than the earlier sequences in the series.  Valerie goes outside where it is raining -- characters comment on the fact that the California drought seems to have ended -- and the falling water in the air gives the images an impressionistic tone:  it is sunny but rain is decorating the streets and the atmosphere glows with a subtly vibrant light. Seeing Red is the name of the sit-com in which Valerie stars (the show is named after her trademark red hair) and, as she leaves the auditorium, she darts across the red carpet, now vast and empty and drenched by the falling rain.  A parking attendant hands her a brilliantly red umbrella and the camera luxuriates in that color in the strangely bright and unnaturally luminous rain fall.  In the final scenes, the red of the umbrella remains as a highlight in the compositions -- it is as if we have departed the sordid world of reality TV and high-pressure show biz for an idyll, something like a film by Jacques Demy.  This transformation in the way the series is shot and designed signifies Valerie's escape from the overwhelming and destructive pressure of continuous surveillance by cameras and stylistically implies a sort of serenity and classical equipoise that makes the show's happy ending seem possible against all odds.