The first season of The Comeback followed has-been actress Valerie Cherish as she tried to claw her way toward something resembling stardom, making merciless fun of reality-TV culture right before a wave of personality-driven reality shows hit the airwaves. And now that HBO has elected to bring the show back, The Comeback has found something new to satirize: edgy HBO shows. Entertainment Weekly reports that the new season will see Valerie cast in Seeing Red, an HBO dramedy written by her old nemesis Paulie G.
Seeing Red is based on Paulie G.’s struggles with drugs behind the scenes of Room And Bored, the terrible network sitcom he and Valerie worked on in the first season of The Comeback. This likely means that Valerie will play a vicious caricature of herself, something the ever-desperate actress will obviously do if it will further her career. The new season will also catch viewers up with the rest of Valerie’s circle like Chris and Juna, her cast mates on Room And Bored, who have gone on to respectively become an action hero and a movie star, a development that mirrors the trajectories of Kellan Lutz and Malin Ackerman, the actors who play them.
Executive producer Michael Patrick King promises that the second season of The Comeback will stay up to date on the fads it satirizes: “What’s happening in television right now are dramedies being listed as comedies but maybe they’re not funny, movie stars doing limited series, behind the scenes footage for social media and web content… there’s a lot of the real thing within our fantasy, because that’s what we did last time,” he says.
As for Valerie herself, she’ll continue to try to mimic the trends of the day without really understanding them—she now has a vlog as well as a meager Twitter following, one she nonetheless thinks is very impressive. The new season of The Comeback premieres on HBO on November 9.