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Michael Patrick King has spent decades writing about people navigating worlds where everything feels transactional. With the colossally successful Sex and the City<\/em>, which spawned multiple films and the sequel series And Just Like That\u2026<\/em>, King explored how identity, romance, and status become tangled up in consumerism and self-invention. In the long-running sitcom 2 Broke Girls<\/em>, the focus shifted toward economic precarity and the humiliations of trying to survive in a world where money shapes nearly every relationship.<\/p>\n But King’s sharpest work may be The Comeback<\/em>, the HBO cult classic<\/a> he co-created with Lisa Kudrow, who stars as Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actress whose relentless pursuit of relevance<\/a> forms the series’ backbone. Across its three-season run, with each installment arriving roughly a decade apart, King, who is 71, has managed to satirize whatever fresh indignity Hollywood has devised for itself. <\/p>\n The original 2005 season targeted the rise of reality television. The 2014 revival turned its attention toward prestige cable auteurs and the absurdity lurking beneath television\u2019s so-called golden age. And now, with its newly completed third season, we follow Valerie as she signs on to star in a sitcom secretly written by AI<\/a>, turning the entertainment industry’s anxiety over automation into perhaps the show\u2019s bleakest punch line yet.<\/p>\n Plenty of shows have started poking at AI anxiety. (HBO stablemate Hacks<\/em> aired an anti-LLM episode<\/a> just a few weeks ago.) But The Comeback<\/em> approaches the subject from a darker and, in some ways, more uncomfortable angle. King and Kudrow are less interested in warning viewers about rogue technology than in examining the human appetite that makes this kind of technological displacement possible in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n In a spoiler-filled conversation, King spoke with me about why artificial intelligence could be an extinction event for writing, the enduring appeal of the sitcom, and Scranton, Pennsylvania\u2019s track record of producing great playwrights. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n I wish I\u2019d had my recorder on for the 10 minutes while we talked about both growing up in Scranton.<\/strong><\/p>\n Come on, like all you journalists, you can make it up!<\/p>\n You\u2019re right, I\u2019ll just make something up.<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s a very good young playwright from Scranton, Stephen Karam. He wrote The Humans<\/em>, about a family from Scranton who come to New York to see their daughter, who lives in Chinatown. It was so scary and great.<\/p>\n Don’t forget, we\u2019ve also got the priest from The Exorcist<\/em> in our ranks.<\/strong><\/p>\n Jason Miller, of course. People say to me, \u201cWhere\u2019s your plaque in Scranton?” I say, \u201cWell, I guess I never defeated the devil, so I don\u2019t get one.\u201d<\/p>\n Actually, Scranton loves Jason Miller because he wrote That Championship Season<\/em>, a play about a high school basketball coach in Scranton and the players coming back 10 years later. It was a big deal. It won the Pulitzer. And he died an alcoholic! What more do you need from Scranton? [Laughs<\/em>]<\/p>\n I could talk Scranton for hours, but we should probably jump into The Comeback<\/em>. Was the AI theme in this season always present from the moment you and Lisa Kudrow sat down, or did it emerge as you started writing the season?<\/strong><\/p>\n It emerged. Lisa and I did the first season, then it was canceled. And 10 years later, HBO basically said, \u201cWe made a mistake, come back.\u201d The idea for season 2 was to go very meta and have Valerie go to HBO. It became a very big critical success; suddenly everybody was on board. After that<\/em>, everybody said, \u201cYou\u2019re done,\u201d and we thought we were. But Lisa and I would still get together every so often for lunch and talk about Valerie. We\u2019d come up with funny things for her to do.<\/p>\n Right before we started writing this season, Lisa said, \u201cIt\u2019s too bad Valerie wasn\u2019t around during the writers\u2019 strike. She would\u2019ve been hilarious.\u201d I agreed, and then I remembered the most shocking thing about the end of the 2023 strike\u2014hearing \u201cWe\u2019re going to have to revisit this negotiation<\/a> in three years because of AI.\u201d The second that thought came into my head, I knew immediately: Valerie against AI.<\/p>\n It had the same terror and dark prediction that existed in the first season, where reality television was going to eclipse narrative television and take everybody\u2019s jobs away. This felt like that, times a million. Not just another phase of television, but potentially an extinction event. Our goal was to get on the air before the reality of all this fully arrived.<\/p>\n Do you feel like you achieved that?<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah. One of the most important things we learned talking to experts was that the public doesn\u2019t really push back on AI for financial or clerical things, or even personal organization. The pushback comes when people realize it\u2019s making art.<\/p>\n That insight gave us the whole thriller aspect of the season: Valerie is starring in an AI-generated show, but it\u2019s a secret. Nobody would openly admit they were using AI creatively unless they knew it worked.<\/p>\n It\u2019s interesting you say that, because one thing I really liked about the show is that it doesn\u2019t let the public off the hook. It\u2019s not just blaming the tech companies or studio executives. The audience is implicated too.<\/strong><\/p>\n Lisa has a degree in microbiology from Vassar, so her approach is very scientific. We wanted to get as much information as possible and not invent ridiculous things that would immediately feel false. The predictions in the show are intentionally very grounded and local to writing, because that\u2019s something we understood.<\/p>\n And one thing we learned is that AI is already much further along than people think. ChatGPT is already a three-year-old award show joke. That\u2019s why we didn\u2019t want the jokes in the show to feel broad or clunky. We wanted them to feel plausible.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a moment in episode 4 where the writers reject a joke because they prefer their own, but then they use one from the AI program, and the audience laughs at it. There\u2019s a sadness on the writers\u2019 faces because the audience will<\/em> respond to the formula.<\/p>\n Was it difficult writing something that\u2019s almost speculative sci-fi in a comedy format?<\/strong><\/p>\n The Comeback<\/em> has always been slightly off-brand as a comedy. It never really fit conventional comedy rhythms. Part of why the first season had a rough reception is that nothing in the performance or the structure tells the audience when to laugh. There are no cues. It\u2019s comic and tragic at the same time.<\/p>\n So doing something that\u2019s part comedy, part thriller actually felt natural for the show. And again, all of that came from one researcher saying people react differently<\/a> when AI enters the world of art. That\u2019s the great thing about being a writer: You hear information everybody else could hear, but it hits you in a specific way.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve also heard you say in <\/strong>other interviews<\/strong><\/a> that audiences ultimately decide what works and what doesn\u2019t. Do you worry that, with AI, audiences are going to acclimate themselves to lower standards?<\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s complicated, because truly excellent work can also go unrecognized. There\u2019s an entire silo of reality TV that people watch without thinking of it as quality. It\u2019s more like candy or fast food. Then occasionally something comes along\u2014Succession<\/em>, Baby Reindeer<\/em>, Adolescence<\/em>\u2014where everybody recognizes something special. Then there are smaller, devoted audiences, which is what The Comeback<\/em> started as and still is in many ways. <\/p>\n What I worry about more is how quickly online opinion shapes people\u2019s reactions now. Somebody says something is bad, and suddenly everyone watches it with that dent already in their mind. There have always been critics, but now there are just infinitely more opinions everywhere.<\/p>\n The season also seems to argue that sitcoms still matter, especially in this era of prestige dramas and limited series.<\/strong><\/p>\n The good<\/em> sitcom still matters. There\u2019s something comforting about familiar people you like. Friends<\/em> is the obvious example. Honestly, I keep wondering why nobody has fully cracked the modern sitcom again. It\u2019s the most financially efficient format there is. Five sets, five actors, no special effects.<\/p>\n The conventional wisdom became that networks deadened sitcoms with notes. A few great ones got through, but there was also so much demand for content that plenty of mediocre sitcoms existed too. Now we\u2019re in a moment where streamers can do almost anything, and yet nobody really seems interested in reinventing the sitcom form. People mostly revisit the old ones.<\/p>\n