Kathryn Hahn’s “comeback” has ended before it even began. A planned Showtime limited series about trailblazing comedian Joan Rivers, starring Hahn in the lead role, is no longer happening, Variety reports. The Comeback Girl would’ve been executive produced by Hahn, director Greg Berlanti, and writer Cosmo Carlson.
Rivers’s daughter, Melissa, reportedly owns the life rights to her mother’s story, which hadn’t been obtained by the show’s producers. According to Variety, the series could’ve continued unauthorized, but it wouldn’t have been able to use any of Rivers’s jokes or have access to the comedian’s estate. The Comeback Girl was set to explore a painful time in Rivers’s life, following the cancellation of her late-night series and the suicide of her husband and Melissa’s father, Edgar Rosenberg. Melissa Rivers’s rep declined to comment on the report to Vanity Fair.
The casting of a non-Jewish Hahn as Rivers was also a point of contention. After news of the series broke, commentators like Sarah Silverman spoke out against a Hollywood habit she called “Jewface.” “There’s this long tradition of non-Jews playing Jews—and not just playing people who happen to be Jewish, but people whose Jewishness is their whole being,” Silverman said on her podcast. “One could argue, for instance, that a gentile [a non-Jew] playing Joan Rivers correctly would be doing what is actually called ‘Jewface.’” Other examples she listed included Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On the Basis of Sex, Margo Martindale as Bella Abzug in Mrs. America, and Tracey Ullman as Betty Friedan in that same FX limited series.
Rivers’s life has partially inspired several recent series, including HBO Max’s Hacks, starring Jean Smart, and Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring Rachel Brosnahan—neither of whom is Jewish. Melissa Rivers herself played a younger version of her mother in 2015’s Joy, which starred Jennifer Lawrence as home shopping entrepreneur Joy Mangano.
Now that The Comeback Girl is no longer, Hahn’s dance card is only slightly less full. Her upcoming projects include Knives Out 2, Apple TV+’s The Shrink Next Door, and the reprisal of her role as Agatha in a reported WandaVision spin-off series.
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