Comedy writers behind HBO's Hacks and The Comeback have spoken about how difficult it was to end their long-running series, with creators Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King reflecting on saying goodbye to The Comeback's Valerie Cherish, a character Kudrow has played intermittently since 2005. Speaking at Sublime Primetime, an event hosted by the Writers Guild Foundation, the pair were joined by Hacks creators Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs and Jen Statsky, who described similarly emotional reactions to concluding their own show after five seasons.

Kudrow and King filmed The Comeback's final scene, in which Cherish rejects the idea that she must accept humiliation, on the very last day of production, deliberately timing it to coincide with the anniversary of Kudrow's Friends finale. Hacks ended in May with Jean Smart's Deborah Vance revealing a cancer diagnosis before deciding, with Hannah Einbinder's Ava, to keep writing instead. Aniello said she had been reluctant to admit how much she missed the characters, while Statsky noted the rarity of getting to make a comedy series at all in the current climate.