“In science, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on a phenomenon being observed.”—“Observer effect (physics),” Wikipedia

It took a solid minute, at one point, for my brain to catch up with The Comeback last night, for the observer to understand the observed. It wasn’t Valerie Cherish’s superstar costar Juna’s confession of hurt feelings or her other superstar costar Chris’s profession of lust that did it. It wasn’t blood flowing from her best friend Mickey’s nose or shit gushing from Valerie’s pipes. It wasn’t the red carpet or the Emmys themselves. It was the almost physically disorienting sight of Valerie Cherish, off-camera.

When Valerie flees the award ceremony in a frantic attempt to contact her estranged husband Mark about Mickey’s rapidly deteriorating health, she leaves Jane’s camera crew behind. By rights, that should be the end of the episode right there. Everything we’ve seen during both seasons of The Comeback, after all, has technically been footage shot for one of its many shows-within-a-show: I’m It, Room and Bored, The Comeback, Seeing Red, The Assassination of Valerie Cherish, The Talk, Tonight Show, even The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. But when Valerie passes through the doors of the auditorium and out of the sight of the camera eye, there’s no Sopranos-style crash cut to black. Valerie’s still there, bathed in the warmth of film instead of the handheld coldness of digital. Suddenly, given the limitations imposed on every single shot in the series so far, we’re seeing something that should be impossible to see. The reality show is over—this is real.

The Comeback has never shied away from metacommentary, duh, but this is some next-level, Dorothy stepping into a Technicolor dreamworld and realizing she’s not in Kansas anymore shit, a use of the medium itself to convey the message. In a way, it’s also an internal callback to the loathsome drug-dream fantasy sequences central to Seeing Red, writer Pauly G.’s clumsy attempt to articulate his emotional reality by cutting away from reality-reality. But it reminded me of nothing so much as the marvelous magic-realist ending of Hal Ashby’s Being There: Lisa Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish standing in for Peter Sellers’s Chauncey Gardener, umbrella in hand, striding through the water and doing the impossible. To say it was the single strongest moment in a TV comedy in 2014 would be to imply anything else even came close.

And yet. Something about “Valerie Gets What She Really Wants,” the finale for The Comeback’s second season and, I assume, The Comeback period, struck me as less than magical: To get what she really wants, Valerie makes a sacrifice no one else is asked to make.

I reviewed the season finale of The Comeback for the New York Observer. I had very mixed feelings!

I talked about the season finales of Homeland and The Affair and the penultimate episode of The Comeback on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert show today. Watch it here!

…that’s the thing about Valerie that separates her from the Larry Davids and David Brents of the world: People care about her, and she cares about them in return. Think back to how much the cast of Room and Bored, especially Juna, liked her back in Season One, and how she went to bat for them too. Look at Mickey or Esperanza, employees whose affection for Valerie is totally genuine. Even her nemeses respect her on some level: Jane’s dead-eyed “anything for the story” careerism often dissolves when confronted with some display of confidence or vulnerability on Valerie’s part. And the elevator scene at the end of the episode is the strongest evidence yet that Paulie G. recognizes how lucky he is to have landed Valerie for a project that otherwise would have floundered, and how easy she can be to talk to if he just lets it happen.

Valerie Cherish is much more than just the sitcom-structure equivalent of a Christmas tree, on which you can hang funny scenes like ornaments. (Though there were plenty of those this week: Mickey’s all-nude revue, the dead-on parade of new-media stereotypes at Val’s junket, Val having enough chutzpah to work the audience on The Talk and bust Jane’s chops with off-color jokes back home.) She’s as close as this kind of comedy has ever gotten to a real character, existing not just as a joke-delivery mechanism but as a person whose behavior has lasting moral and emotional consequences on herself and the people she loves. It hurts when love breaks down.

I reviewed last night’s very strong episode of The Comeback for the New York Observer.

“You have arrived at your destination.”—Valerie’s GPS

“Have I?”—Valerie

Valerie Cherish got a rave review in The New York Times. The show she’s on, Seeing Red? Not so much. But still! “Valerie Cherish,” “rave review,” and “New York Times” were surely three phrases not even perpetually loyal Mickey ever expected to see in the same sentence, maybe not even on the same page. Yet there they are, sticking Valerie alongside the likes of Bryan Cranston and Claire Danes in the “‘90s network TV stars kicking ass on prestige cable dramas” club. It’s the kind of success she’d dreamed of for a decade—an actual, honest-to-god comeback. The question that “Valerie Cooks in the Desert,” last night’s episode, asks: “Now what?”

I reviewed this week’s typically great episode of The Comeback for the New York Observer.

I’ll be talking about the Newsroom finale, The Comeback, The Affair, and Homeland on @huffpostlive at 5:30pm—tune in: http://huff.lv/1DhCjt6

Sitcoms are boring to look at. You ever think about that? How one of only two fictional-entertainment teams on TV throws the visual game before it even reaches the playing field? You get sitcoms that are cleverly edited, sure, where the comic timing depends on the cuts; Arrested Development takes top honors here.. You get sitcoms that do convincing pastiches of other genres of TV (Community), or of the documentary/reality format (too many to list, but you’re reading about one right now). And if you look down memory lane you can find shows that had a visual tone that made them memorable and unmistakable, like the Gordon Willis golds and browns of the bar set in Cheers. But in much the same way that mainstream movie comedy appears content to leave “I dunno gang, maybe we should make the thing look good too” in the hands of the Coen Brothers, the situation comedy has pretty much tossed the visual-innovation baton to Adult Swim and called it a race.

Bless its black heart: The Comeback tries harder. “Valerie Is Taken Seriously,” last night’s killer episode (a welcome return to form after last week’s suicidal one), has the mockumentary thing down cold. It also nails not one but two genre spoofs: the grim’n’gritty, dimly lit world of HBO dramas, and the day-glo gibberish of children’s television. (As the father of a three year old, I assure you that far greater horrors than Nicky Nicky Nack Nack lurk in the kids’ section of channel guide.) It could easily have coasted. Instead, it staged its two lynchpin scenes — Valerie’s transformation into a literal monster via green screen, and her eye-opening conversation about her performance with the New York Times reporter — to look as memorable as they felt.

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of The Comeback for the New York Observer/comedies are boring-looking most of the time for some reason.

I’ll be talking about last night’s execrable episode of The Newsroom (as well as Homeland, which was also very bad, and The Comeback, which was very good) on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert at 4:30pm. Tune in here!

It’s an irony literally no character on the show possesses the self-awareness required to appreciate, but here it is: It took an act of literal self-destruction for a show about the slow-motion, largely self-inflicted crushing of a human spirit to hit a serious wall.

Not that death should be off limits for The Comeback, or for any other cringe comedy. Untimely demises have been a part of the genre going back to Spinal Tap’s countless dead drummers. (“The official explanation was he choked on vomit….Well, they can’t really prove whose vomit it was.” “You can’t really dust for vomit.”) The Comeback’s own HBO antecedent, Curb Your Enthusiasm, went to the mortality well most memorably when Larry David’s dad told him he hadn’t been informed of his own mother’s funeral because “she told me not to bother you.” Both of the examples illustrate the central conceit of their respective stories: Spinal Tap chronicles a world of moronic debauchery, while Curb obsesses over the millions of minute rules that govern human interaction. So if a drummer is murdered by puke in the former, or a son misses his mom’s funeral because his dad didn’t want to impose in the latter, the pieces fit.

But the suicide that serves as a climax for “Valerie Saves the Show” is a hearse of a different color.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Comeback for the New York Observer.

I’ll be talking The Newsroom, The Comeback, The Walking Dead, and the best shows for a holiday-break binge on HuffPost Live’s Spoiler Alert today at 5:05pm. Tune in here!

I’ll be talking The Comeback, The Newsroom, The Affair, and Homeland on @HuffPostLive today at 5pm. Tune in here!

My skin is crawling and I’ve never felt more alive.

This, verbatim, was my reaction the first time I watched The Comeback just two short weeks ago. Actually, it followed an all-caps rant on my twitter feed to the effect of OH MY GOD WHY DID NONE OF YOU TELL ME TO WATCH THE COMEBACK BEFORE. A mockumentary in which the protagonist occasionally realizes the joke is on her and visibly chokes back tears? Where have you been all my life?

As the kind of person who could only like This Is Spinal Tap more if the “Stonehenge” sequence had been followed by an unbroken two-minute shot of David St. Hubbins having a backstage breakdown upon realizing his entire life was a miserable failure, this was manna from heaven for me. Its trick is that by forcing you to experience the humiliations of Valerie Cherish asgenuinely humiliating, with all the barely tamped-down misery that entails, instead of just as joke fodder, the show is actually more empathetic to her suffering, and harsher on the sexist system of celebrity that inflicts it.

So you can keep your Liz Lemons and your Leslie Knopes and their adorkably heartwarming/heartwarmingly adorkable tumblr gifsets—I wear all black all the time, for god’s sake. Give me Valerie Cherish auditioning for a role designed to tear her to shreds because it’s the only role she can get. I want comedy that hurts. If it comes in a pastel track suit, so fucking be it. And from what I’ve managed to see so far (the three extant episodes of Season Two and about half of Season One, which I’m HBOGoing as fast as my internet service provider can handle it), few episodes of The Comeback have been quite this painful.

Hooray, I’m reviewing The Comeback for the New York Observer now! Thanks to Drew Grant for giving me this chance to SHINE!

I’ll be talking The Newsroom, The Comeback, The Affair, and Homeland on @HuffPostLive at 4:50pm. Tune in here!