By Karen Sternheimer

Lisa Kudrow’s HBO Max show, The Comeback, features a sitcom actress trying to revive her career decades after her heyday. The first season in 2005 explored how reality television shaped the creative landscape at the time. The third season—released 21 years later in 2026— considers what happens when AI writes a sitcom and casts Lisa Kudrow’s character, Valerie Cherish, to star.

While not an ideal situation, Cherish has few other career options. She and her husband, who lost his job in finance, have downsized from a house to a high-rise condo. Cherish does the best she can to make the most of the opportunity, using her connections to famed television director James Burrows, real-life director of classic sitcoms Taxi, Cheers, Will & Grace, and Frasier to get him involved in the project.

Cherish convinces Burrows to sign on after reassuring him that a husband and wife writing team are showrunners, with AI filling in for what would normally be a full writing staff of 6 to 12 writers. The producers call the bot “AL” and pretend “he” is human to the rest of the cast to hide the fact that there is actually no writing staff on the show. We later learn that the human writers are completely checked out.

At first, having AL do some quick rewrites while shooting works well. AL is fast and comes up with some decent one-liners. But Burrows quits after the pilot, saying it’s missing a human element that gives a show its heart.

The second episode of the fictional sitcom goes horribly wrong, when AL’s script inexplicably sends the lead character to prison. Cherish chases down the human writers to demand a rewrite, but it is clear that they don’t care about the show. While most writers would dream of an opportunity to write and run a show, they are just trying to cash in while they can, before these jobs disappear completely. When they quit, a young assistant is promoted to show runner—typically reserved for people with ample experience in television—and it is clear he is in way over his head. Chaos ensues.

This show takes a nuanced view of the role of AI in creative fields. When budgets are tight and television production must transform, there may be a role for AI. But what is that role?

In 2023, writers and actors went on strike to protect their professions in the face of AI possibly reducing the already limited jobs available. Questions about the future remain unknown: will actors’ likenesses be used without approval or compensation in AI creations? Will extras, the people who appear in the background of a scene, be a relic of the past? Traditionally, being an extra has given new actors a chance to make connections, or even possibly earn a coveted SAG card to be able to work on union productions.

This issue came to a head last year with the introduction of “Tilly Norwood,” an AI bot created to “star” in a feature film. Apparently created using machine learning, this creation was based on culling characteristics from actual humans, stoking fears that actors could be easily replaced. Ethicists wondered whether there might be scenes that would be inappropriate for a human actor, as Tilly Norwood was designed to appear like a teenaged girl or a very young woman.

Of course, if an artificial human actor fails to drive interest and profits, its use will be limited. This will be put to the test with a new movie featuring “Tilly Norwood.” No box office success, no worries for humans.

Creative workers are particularly economically vulnerable, even without AI. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median earnings for actors in 2025 was $29.05/hour, or approximately $58,000 a year, if one were to work a regular workweek (40 hours, 50 weeks a year). But work for actors is notoriously sporadic, with supply vastly outweighing demand. So, unlike other more consistent work, the BLS annual salary might bear little resemblance to actors’ economic experiences. While wealthy celebrities and social media influencers might seem ubiquitous, most earn relatively little, as this 2020 Everyday Sociology Blog post discusses.

Other professions face similar threats. Music, graphic design, costume creation, and any artistic endeavor might be taken over by AI. The use of AI encourages us to think about the foundation of any art form: its reflection and resonance with the human experience. Can AI make us laugh? Can a bot draw from a range of human experiences, as artists do from their own to connect with others?

As humans, we draw upon our histories, our varied identities, and the mélange of influences from our families, communities, and forms of media that resonate with us when expressing ourselves creatively. At its core, artistic expression makes us uniquely human, and is drawn from the human experience. Whether an algorithm can reproduce these qualities remains to be seen.