‘The Comeback’ Season 3: Michael Patrick King on AI as the End of Creativity
Michael Patrick King’s Career Arc
For decades, Michael Patrick King has chronicled how people navigate worlds where every interaction feels transactional. With Sex and the City—which launched films and the sequel And Just Like That…—he explored how identity, romance, and status get tangled up in consumerism and self-invention. In 2 Broke Girls, he shifted focus to economic precarity and the humiliations of surviving in a money-driven society. But his sharpest work may be The Comeback, the HBO cult classic he co-created with Lisa Kudrow.
The Comeback: A Satirical Mirror to Hollywood
Kudrow stars as Valerie Cherish, a washed-up sitcom actress whose relentless pursuit of relevance forms the series’ backbone. Across three seasons—each arriving roughly a decade apart—King, now 71, has satirized whatever fresh indignity Hollywood has devised. The original 2005 season targeted the rise of reality television. The 2014 revival took aim at prestige cable auteurs and the absurdity lurking beneath television’s so-called golden age.
Season 3: AI Writes the Punchlines
Now, with its newly completed third season, The Comeback follows Valerie as she signs on to star in a sitcom secretly written by artificial intelligence. This turns the entertainment industry’s anxiety over automation into perhaps the show’s bleakest punch line yet. Many shows have started poking at AI anxiety—Hacks aired an anti-LLM episode just weeks ago—but The Comeback approaches the subject from a darker, more uncomfortable angle.
AI Anxiety Through a Darker Lens
King and Kudrow are less interested in warning viewers about rogue technology than in examining the human appetite that makes technological displacement possible. In a spoiler-filled conversation, King spoke about why artificial intelligence could be an extinction event for writing. He also reflected on the enduring appeal of the sitcom and his roots in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Scranton’s Influence
Born and raised in Scranton, King notes the city’s unexpected track record of producing great playwrights. He name-checks Stephen Karam, who wrote The Humans, and Jason Miller, author of That Championship Season and star of The Exorcist. King jokes that while Scranton honors Miller with a plaque for defeating the devil, he might not get one—because he never faced that challenge. But his work, he suggests, takes on its own demons.
The Future of Creativity
With The Comeback, King has again found a way to hold a mirror to Hollywood’s latest anxieties. The third season asks uncomfortable questions: Are we willing to trade human creativity for efficiency? What happens when the story is written by a machine? King’s warning is clear—if we don’t scrutinize our own appetites, AI may not just change how stories are told, but end human creativity as we know it.