TV veteran Michael Patrick King has had an extended, vigorous profession, writing, directing and producing on exhibits together with Murphy Brown, Will & Grace and 2 Broke Girls. He’s finest recognized, although, for his work on the Sex and the City franchise, serving as its showrunner for the majority of its run, writing and directing its two movies, and masterminding its controversial 2020s revival And Just Like That. But this month sees the return of one among his most cherished, and maybe most underwatched, exhibits: The Comeback.
Co-created and co-written with Lisa Kudrow, The Comeback first aired in 2005, telling the story of a gormless sitcom star named Valerie Cherish, performed by Kudrow, attempting to return to stardom by means of the then-new format of actuality TV. The present had a clumsy, blackly hilarious tone that was successful with critics and the Emmys, however failed to seek out a lot of an viewers. Nine years later, in 2014, it returned for a masterly second season wherein Valerie – now enjoying herself in a gritty HBO dramatisation of the occasions of season one, and filming the entire thing as an audition tape for The Real Housewives – confronts her failing marriage and relationships.
Diehard fans have been clamouring for a third season ever since. And although King says “we never expected to come back”, here he is, promoting The Comeback’s triumphant, and steadfastly ultimate, new season. “Lisa and I would get together all the time and have lunch,” he says, “and towards the end, the conversation would drift to, ‘What do you think Valerie’s doing?’ There was an open door, but everything was unspoken, because we were all very happy after season two.”
But Hollywood, which has been experiencing a few of its most tumultuous years in reminiscence due to the rise of streaming and social media, plus a spate of strikes, was begging for Valerie’s return. At one among King and Kudrow’s lunches after the WGA and Sag-Aftra strikes of 2023, Kudrow mused that it could be humorous to see Valerie, hardly ever a superb individual to have round in a disaster, take care of her trade in misery. King instantly noticed a chance: the Writers’ Guild had forewarned that its subsequent large negotiation, in 2026, can be about AI. “The only reason to come back,” he says, “was because it felt like a perfect Valerie storm. We thought it was worth the risk.”
Season three of The Comeback begins in the course of the strike. Valerie is – after all – haranguing strike negotiator Fran Drescher, enjoying herself, for a photograph. But the majority of the season takes place in 2026, when Valerie has been solid because the lead in a brand new sitcom referred to as How’s That? The studio making the present has given Valerie govt producer standing, with a caveat: How’s That? is written by AI, and she’s not allowed to inform the solid or crew.
Valerie is still being adopted round by a movie crew – Laura Silverman returns as put-upon documentarian Jane – as well as a social media assistant, performed with droll hilarity by Ben Stiller’s daughter Ella. Of course, that doesn’t really feel so novel any extra. “Everything that was considered desperate and ruthless in season one is now commonplace,” says King. “We know what people will do for attention, or to create a brand. Sacrifice husbands, bring their children on camera.”
The robust implication of this season – and its finale end-credits tag studying “No AI was used in the making of this show” – is that AI is already rampant in Hollywood. King says he hasn’t heard about any exhibits utilizing AI, however that their dialogue of AI within the present is knowledgeable by analysis he and Kudrow performed. “The idea of keeping the AI a secret came from experts we met,” he says. “They told us that the one place the public pushes back on AI is in art.”
Before she was an actor, Kudrow was a scientist – a biologist, really. “So,” says King, “we didn’t want to make stuff up that would look foolish if it was put on TV.” He still remembers one bone-chilling assembly with a researcher whose AI mannequin predicted what season three can be about.
“It sounded kind of like Jodie Foster,” he remembers. “It had a very smart, warm voice.” The mannequin started speaking about the way it appreciated a few of King’s previous work, at which level he demanded it’s turned off. “According to our research, AI is much further along than ChatGPT,” he says. “They say GPT is like a toddler compared to where they are. Everything in the show is very possible – nothing is fantastical.”
What’s curious is that, given the extent of their AI analysis, they determined to put Valerie again in a multi-camera sitcom. This is basically seen as a useless format, though King calls sitcoms “Valerie’s holy grail”. He loves the format, having began his profession there. His present 2 Broke Girls, which led to 2017, is without doubt one of the final examples of a significant long-running multi-cam sitcom. It was derided for its retrograde jokes about race, gender and sexuality. How does he really feel about that now?
“As Valerie says to her husband in this season, ‘You told a joke at a time when jokes were illegal.’ There were a lot of illegal jokes in 2 Broke Girls. It was designed to be situation comedy meets burlesque. I call it high-low. I don’t know if AI would have written a lot of those jokes – they were too sharp, and potentially dangerous. Everything is somebody’s opinion. That’s the trickiest thing about television – somebody’s opinion!”
Speaking of viewer suggestions, that brings us to And Just Like That, one of the most widely debated shows HBO has ever aired. King still holds the assumption that viewers will finally come to know the sequence, which ended its three-season run final yr.
“If The Comeback has taught me anything,” he says, “it’s that perceptions can change over the years. The Comeback’s first perception was: it failed. Then it grew in relevance as the world caught up. I think And Just Like That will potentially age well. It has the same DNA as the original Sex and the City, which was society telling 35-year-old women they should be married. In And Just Like That, society was telling 55-year-old women they shouldn’t be wearing tulle. I’ve always tried to be excited about writing the individual v society.”
The threat of getting followers dislike a personality as they become old, he says, is value it if it opens up the potential for excellent tv. “I’m interested in how characters change,” he says. “The surprise for me was discovering that fans don’t want their characters to change – they want to see them frozen in the time they fell in love with them. That’s a particular dilemma if you’re trying to move things forward. If there was a great disaster, it would have been if And Just Like That tried to be Sex and the City. It’s much better to come back, break it, and be a new show, even though you’re going to get hit with, ‘We like the other show better.’ Well, OK – it’s still there.”
Will the third season of The Comeback lastly garner the kind of viewers figures that Sex and the City luxuriated in, as Valerie is seen to have modified and grown? “We got cancelled and we’re here 21 years later,” says King, earlier than dipping into an impression of Valerie: “It’ll come around!”
