The Comeback is a great check-in on the state of Hollywood: The satire, starring Lisa Kudrow as actress Valerie Cherish, has aired one season roughly every decade since its 2005 debut, and Kitty Doris-Bates has handled the show’s production design through it all.
But the show’s latest season, its third, brought all-new challenges: Valerie is now living in a fresh condo and working on a new multi-camera sitcom, How’s That, written by AI.
The Comeback built the condo set at the same Warner Bros. Studio stage where the show’s pilot was shot in 2004. The lavish condo was inspired by the Sierra Towers in West Hollywood, where the show couldn’t actually film.
“There have been changes in Valerie’s life and she’s trying to be modern and keep with the times while still being a part of the entertainment community,” Doris-Bates says. “You wanted to feel that a decorator had done it and it’s not really personal to her, except her dressing room, where it’s all about her.”
Kitty Doris-Bates on The Comeback Portrait That Haunted Her
The foyer is an entryway to Valerie’s desperation: It holds an Andy Warhol-esque portrait of Valerie. Doris-Bates says creating it was “torture” to get done, and that the show eventually commissioned an artist to complete it.
“They kept teasing me in the art department, calling it ‘The Mona Lisa’ because I spent so much time on that thing,” Doris-Bates says. “In that portrait she’s greeting you as the many faces of being an actor. Having your own portrait in your entryway says something, but we didn’t want it to look cheesy.”
The team wanted the rest of the condo space to feel open and full of light, as though Valerie was opening up and letting go. But the dressing room is the exception: It’s like a museum of Valerie.
In a callback to Kudrow’s past, the AI-generated show How’s That occupies the old Friends studio on the Warner Bros. lot. The old-fashioned coziness of the set juxtaposes with the inhumanity of the show’s writing.
Doris-Bates enjoyed the process of filling the space.
“Mechanically, it’s a shallow stage and more of a longer rectangle than a square,” she says. “So it is a challenge because of how many cameras we have and how big the camera aisle has to be. … Plus, we didn’t have the money to really deck out the stage the way they would in the sitcom.”
Doris-Bates says the track record of Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, who created the show together, helped The Comeback score more access on the Warner Bros. lot than other productions might get. That makes the show feel all the more real.
“The whole show is surprising,” she says. “For something that looks as off-the-cuff as it does, it’s a lot of work to orchestrate.”
The Comeback is now streaming on HBO Max. You can read more of our interviews with 2026 Emmy FYC contenders here.
Main image: The foyer of Valerie Cherish’s condo on The Comeback. HBO