Lisa Kudrow’s Acclaimed HBO Comedy The Comeback Gets Surprise Season 3, Nearly 11 Years After Last Season

The Comeback is making a comeback!

Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King’s acclaimed comedy series is returning for a third season on both HBO and HBO Max in 2026, the network announced on Friday, June 27.

The third season, which will also mark the final go at the four-time Emmy-nominated series, will arrive over 11 years after The Comeback wrapped its second season in December 2014 — and over two decades after its first season debuted in 2005.

Returning series regulars will include Kudrow, who plays protagonist and actress Valerie Cherish, as well as Dan Bucatinsky, Laura Silverman and Damian Young.

“Valerie Cherish has found her way back to the current television landscape,” King, 70, and Kudrow, 61, said in a statement on Friday. “Neither of us are surprised she did.”

The pair will executive produce the show’s third season alongside John Melfi and Bucatinsky. The Comeback will begin production over the summer, per HBO.

“No matter what the industry throws at her, Valerie Cherish is a survivor,” HBO’s Amy Gravitt, executive vice president of HBO & Max Comedy Programming, said in a statement. “On the 20th Anniversary of her debut, Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow have brilliantly scripted her return to HBO and we can’t wait to see that.”

The Comeback first premiered on HBO in June 2005, running for 13 episodes as Kudrow’s first starring TV stint post-Friends. It followed a “B-list actress” who agrees to “do a reality show that follows her efforts to land a part in a sitcom in this comedy series,” per an HBO synopsis. While it was first cancelled in September 2005 after just one season, it amassed a cult following and returned for a revival season in 2014.

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The second season ran for eight episodes in November and December 2014. Speaking with The Daily Beast in 2022, Kudrow said that she and King didn’t “know if HBO” was interested in a third season at that point, but hadn’t “asked.”

“We’re both sort of like, ‘I’m not gonna ask, are you?’ ‘No, I don’t want to hear ‘no,'” she said at the time. “It’s something we love so much. That’s why it took nine years the first time!”

King and Kudrow helped celebrate the series’ 20th anniversary earlier this month, with King telling Variety that while it “went away for a very long time” following its first season, he remembered getting word from HBO executives Mike Lombardo and Casey Bloys about having made “a mistake.”

“[They] said, ‘We made a mistake. Would you do another season?’ Ten years later,” King recalled.

While critics had mixed opinions on The Comeback at the start, the show has since earned its fair share of fans over the last two decades, with King revealing that David Bowie was among them. “As it was being reacted to weirdly, David Bowie called and asked for the episodes, because he had to go on the road and he didn’t want to miss the rest of Valerie,” King told Variety.

“Could he have the advance copies of the episodes that hadn’t aired? We went around saying, ‘Well, David Bowie likes it.'”