“The Comeback” is less a hall of mirrors than a kaleidoscope, reflecting a TV set. Illustration by John Jay Cabuay

HBO’s “The Comeback,” which was co-created by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, ran for one razor-sharp season, in 2005. Luckily, largely owing to HBO GO, the series outlived its cancellation. Among comedy cultists, it gained a reputation as the great lost cringe comedy, at once hilarious and heartbreaking, with Kudrow’s Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom star, the peer of Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and David Brent in “The Office.” Like those two shows, “The Comeback” was fake cinéma vérité: the “unedited footage” of a reality show that documented the production of a sitcom, “Room and Bored,” that Valerie hoped would make her a star again. Instead, she finds herself cast as Aunt Sassy, a dirty-joke sidekick. As the writers turn against her, Valerie steps into trap after trap, until, by the finale, she’s become so desperate to be liked that she stage-dives into humiliation, signing vomit bags for reality fans.

Then, last year, a miracle happened: a resurrection. Nearly a decade after canning the series, HBO agreed to produce a comeback of “The Comeback”—a second season with the same core cast. The result, which débuted last weekend, is as spiny and audacious as the original, but very different, because it isn’t aimed at “celebreality” or network sitcoms, now dated targets. Instead, King and Kudrow go for something with more cachet: the auteurist pay-cable antihero series. In the first episode, as Valerie prepares to pitch a new reality series to Bravo, she discovers that there’s already a show in development based on her life—“Seeing Red,” an HBO dramedy, created by her former nemesis, the sitcom writer Paulie G. It’s a scripted re-creation of the terrible events of the original “Comeback,” but from Paulie’s perspective. Naturally, Valerie ends up starring in the show, as Mallory Church, in a red wig that looks exactly like her own red hair, insisting, once again, that the character she’s playing is nothing like her.

Of course, every bit of this is absurdly self-referential. In the nineties, Kudrow starred on “Friends,” which inspired a lawsuit over a sexist writers’ room whose members, like those on the fictional “Room and Bored,” blew off steam by fantasizing the sexual humiliation of the show’s actresses. “Seeing Red” is an HBO dramedy inside an HBO dramedy. King was the showrunner for “Sex and the City”: when the self-involved Valerie spots a poster for that show in HBO’s halls, she coos that now she’ll be “one of the girls.” (She hasn’t seen Lela Durham’s “Girls,” but she’s heard good buzz.) Bravo’s Andy Cohen plays himself; Seth Rogen plays Seth Rogen, who plays Paulie in “Seeing Red.” When observers praise Valerie for her “real” looks and her “brave” performance, it echoes the coded praise that Kudrow received for “The Comeback.”

If you’re a certain type of reader, this description may make you recoil—so “meta,” so “ironic,” so many “air quotes.” “The Comeback” is, it’s true, a scripted series about a reality series about a reality star making a scripted series about the time she made a reality show about a scripted series. It’s less a hall of mirrors than a kaleidoscope, with each surface reflecting a TV set. But it’s worth remembering that meta-comedy isn’t a modern innovation: “I Love Lucy,” the original sitcom, was a meta-comedy fuelled by the contrast between Lucy Ricardo’s desperation for fame and Lucille Ball’s actual fame. In the decades since Lucy threw her first tantrum, the anger of TV writers, and their frustration at TV’s limitations, has inspired a startling proportion of TV’s best comedies. “Monty Python” mocked the pomposity of the BBC; “All in the Family” exploded “Father Knows Best”; “30 Rock” took aim at NBC. “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was Carl Reiner’s attempt to exorcise the experience of working on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows,” and Dan Harmon’s “Community” is, often enough, a show about how difficult it is to make “Community” with Dan Harmon. At their best, such shows double as manifestos against broken systems—they’re do-overs for traumatized creatives, who, like Valerie, keep reliving the same painful story, hoping to find a better ending.

Certainly, that’s part of what made the original “Comeback” so pungent: it was a denunciation of a new genre—the star-studded reality show—that fed on L.A. desperation and threatened the livelihood of writers. It was also a searing critique of the crazy-making environment for older actresses. Halfway through the first season, Valerie—whose complaints about crass gags alienated the men who wrote them—went to the writers’ room, at 2 A.M., with cookies, hoping to make amends. As reality cameras peeked through the blinds, she caught a glimpse of the phenomenon that the director James Burrows (who played himself) called “The Hate Show.” The writers were miming rough sex with her: one pulls an orange T-shirt over his head to simulate her hair while another bends “Valerie” over the table. The sole “girl writer” watches silently. Valerie’s response is to act as if this weren’t happening—or, if it is, as if it’s no big deal. But her facial expression is broken glass. It’s the explicit form of Aunt Sassy’s catchprase: “I don’t need to see that.”

In the new season, Valerie faces similar pressures, but in a different context. There is no writers’ room now. Instead, Paulie G, who has been through rehab for heroin addiction, is a freshly anointed auteur, writing each episode himself, and directing, too, even though he has no experience behind the camera. The HBO imprimatur gives Valerie, and her reality producer, the chance for a big paycheck, plus tickets to the “Golden Globes.” But “prestige dramedy” has its own humiliations. In “The Comeback” ’s standout sequence, Valerie films the sort of graphic sex scene that’s become a numbing cable convention. A two-minute-long, mostly wide-frame shot—in which Valerie, clothed as Aunt Sassy, stands flanked by two naked porn actresses, who moan orgasmically—is at once hilarious and excruciating, deliberately lingering past the point of comfort. The sequence paralyzes the viewer, pulling off a satirical triple lutz, a critique that doubles as the thing being critiqued. Valerie knows enough to praise those naked girls: “So free! So beautiful, really.” Her job, she’s learned, is to be a good sport. Any hint of resistance might get her tagged as “difficult.”

There are plenty of shows that this sequence echoes, but the one that immediately came to mind was Showtime’s “Californication,” whose recent final season was also about a womanizing addict (David Duchovny, as the novelist Hank Moody) writing for an antihero series. Like the HBO show “Entourage” (which débuted a year before “The Comeback”), “Californication” was a meta-comedy packed with celebrities doing playful takedowns of their images, insider references to Hollywood decadence, and female characters who were a mixture of friendly bimbos and feminist sharks, the latter of whom generally stripped down to reveal their expensive lingerie and inner bimbo. But, unlike the puppyish “Entourage,” “Californication” became a toxic mess, with great actresses like Kathleen Turner reduced to roles as one-note ball-busters. In the final season, the wonderful Mary Lynn Rajskub showed up in the mortifying guise of “girl writer” Goldie, who was whiny, allergic to everything, and obsessed with the idea that she wasn’t hot enough for the showrunner to screw. The season felt like the opposite of “The Comeback”: it happily fellated the corrupt system that it pretended to satirize. Only one of these shows is still on TV. Progress!

The original “Comeback” may have emerged too early, before the rise of the alienating heroine, from Mindy Lahiri to Carrie Mathison, Hannah Horvath, and Olivia Pope. Even among this sorority, however, Valerie stands apart. With her Katharine Hepburn warble and her synthetic grin, Kudrow’s Valerie is a marvel: the performance veers toward cruel camp, then shivers with vulnerability. Like Holly Golightly, Valerie is no phony, because she’s a real phony. From a certain angle, even her narcissism begins to seem valiant—a stubborn resistance to an industry that wishes she’d disappear. In Valerie’s lifelong staring contest with the camera, she won’t be the first to blink. ♦