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“Hello blondie,” Michael Patrick King says as he enters the chat, and with it, launches a metaphorical tennis ball in my direction. “So you accept this as real blond?” I ask, attempting to not miss the volley. “I do,” he replies. “I thought you just stepped off a beach in Norway. It’s so blonde, it’s bordering Nazi.”

MPK, as fans call him, is the ideal interview subject for a number of reasons. He’s a writer, and therefore speaks with a natural prose and understanding of the proper way to set up and tell a story. He’s got a terrific memory, able to cull details from 20+ years ago with ease and specificity. He’s “been there, done that,” yet still maintains a curiosity around how things are done now. It’s that combination that makes him crackle. That, and he’s fucking hilarious. But what I like most about him, the part I’ll take away and do everything I can to imbue in my own life, is his fearlessness. And it’s an innate fearlessness. It’s not him saying “let’s be fearless.” It’s him, instead, always acting on the “what if…” and never lingering. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. That’s how it goes.

Take, for instance, the final moments of the pilot episode of And Just Like That. Carrie arrives home from Lily’s piano recital to find her husband, John James Preston, unresponsive in the shower. King’s stage direction in the script read: “The shower water makes the blue of her wedding shoes turn black.” “Oh, how poetic!” he thought. “And then when we filmed it, it was the opposite of poetry. The minute Sarah Jessica [Parker] stepped in the shower and bent down to pick him up, those Manolo wedding shoes blew off her feet. They just left her feet, and I went, ‘Whoa. This is more real than I imagined.’ And it scared me. I was like, ‘I just killed rom-com in this moment.’ It was something that I doubled down on and it was like, ‘Well, we have to break this in order to go forward to do something new.’”

Forward they went, Samantha-less and all. And Just Like That sunsetted staples of the original series like Big and Stanford while introducing a slew of newbies including a new fab foursome: Nicole Ari Parker’s Lisa Todd Wexley, Sarita Choudhury’s Seema Patel, Karen Pittman’s Dr. Nya Wallace and Sara Ramirez’s Che Diaz. Familiar faces abounded — Anthony, Steve, Harry, Natasha, Bitsy von Muffling, Susan Sharon — but this was very much a new entity. And as can often be the case when something new occupies a space once taken up by something more familiar: There were growing pains. 

For his part, King doesn’t mind the criticisms — so long as fans stay watching. “You know those all you can eat buffets on cruises? People are treating television that way where they take a bite of a chocolate cake and go, ‘I’m done! Oh, there’s banana pudding.’ There’s nothing wrong with the chocolate cake, but you saw banana pudding now! And you’re saying this isn’t good now because of banana pudding… and a trifle? But what about the chef that made the chocolate cake? Maybe if there was only chocolate cake you’d appreciate it.” As a lover of chocolate cake, banana pudding and trifles, I’m firmly of the ‘more is more’ camp and just grateful that Michael Patrick King is still baking chocolate cake 25 years after Sex and the City first aired.

Michael, it's truly an honor. I can think of very few people I'd be more excited to chat with than you, as both a fan of Sex and the City and also The Comeback, which I feel is a formative part of my sense of humor.

Oh, great! You're one of the few people who got it early. My anecdote about The Comeback is that it was like the early Christians, the first season. There was a group of people in a cave who really got the message, and everybody else was like, “What is this?”

I’ve never identified with the early Christians until this moment. But, yes, I have my VHS copies of Season 1 still. I was devoted from the outset. It's funny how over the years, it picks up more and more fans, and as an early adopter of the show, I'm always sort of like, “Where were you when we needed you?”

New York City was very ahead of the curve on The Comeback. LA was a little bit more dragging their feet. New York was like, “Yeah! Television is awful!” And LA was like, “I don't know. Is television awful? That's what we do for a living!” New York was very, “We get it all.” 

The other day, I was biking around Brooklyn and I'm watching all these buildings going up and taking in all of the ways in which the city has changed. And here I am talking to you, you who is among a rarified set of people who has helped define New York in so many ways. What do you make of 2023 New York City?

The buildings are very thin. They're very Jenga. It's a New Jenga skyline. It could fall over at any point. I've had a couple of New York’s, and they're very much alive with me. My first New York was when I came here, from when I was 20 to when I was 38 and had no money and no real validation. And then when I did Sex and the City, it was a different New York. And then when we came back to do the first movie, it was the most exalted version of New York. I was on the same sidewalk and I could feel my other self walking at the same time as my realized self was walking. So New York has many facets to it for me. Currently, it's the most gorgeous May I've ever seen. Every single day, I'm walking everywhere because I'm editing and it is blissful. Sex and the City is 25 years old this month, and just that section of New York alone, walking down the street there: “Oh, we filmed there when that was this. This is where Carrie crossed the street with the birthday cake and we pretended that the street was being retarred.” Everything in Sex and the City is really based on those of us who walked the streets at that time and made up stories. So right now, New York is very much in bloom. I think And Just Like That Season 2 has almost the most New York any one season has ever had of the entire IP. Of our Marvel Universe, this season has the most restaurants and the most diverse, dispersed parts of the city that we've ever done in one season. 

Is there a store or monument from the Sex and the City era of filming in New York that's no longer there that you particularly miss? 

Barney's. Like, where does Carrie shop? Barney's was a great touchstone as a comedy joke, and it was also a mecca for style. You could say, “I'm going to Barney's” and it would mean something. As a matter of fact, when we did Season 1 of And Just Like That, one of the things Sarah Jessica placed very specifically on the set was a little black Barney's shopping bag on the stand next to her bed when she was mourning Big, and then we moved it to the bookshelf in the old apartment and it has these brightly colored paper flowers in it. It's a very little Barney's bag; if you bought a jewelry piece, it would be in this bag. But she was very specific that Barney's be referenced. Barney's was a big deal.

How fitting, then, that the AJLT S1 premiere party was held in the old space. A fabulous bookend!

It was like the haunted mansion! [Laughs] They brought it back to life for us. All of a sudden, everything was pink and there was candy and there was fun. Sarah Jessica told me you were there?

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “Proof that it wasn’t all a fever dream.”

December 11, 2021

I was! They had French fries on parasols and it was just so ornate and fabulous.

I saw a video of myself at that party, and I don't want to say that I must have been releasing a lot of pressure, but…

But…

But I looked like a Pixar character. Like, if a spring came to life and went to a party and tried to dance. I was bouncing all over that place, I think because of the release of the pressure of trying to do this again and having it come off well that night.

I remember the gasp in the theater that night, because that was the first time that an audience was seeing Big’s death.

There's something thrilling about a death that's fictional because you got to sort of explore all the feelings that you would feel but without any of the reality of a personal loss. So from a storytelling point of view, to kill someone that people weren't expecting to die was thrilling. It also was a way of going, “We broke it. Boom. I just broke it. Now let's see what this other thing can be, because love the death or hate the death, it certainly wasn't the same, which would have been the death of the series if it had been the same.”

There are a lot of parallels, I feel, between AJLT/SATC and The Comeback. When we talk about Big’s death, I can't help but think about the Season 2 finale of The Comeback and sort of that breaking of the fourth wall, and it's very Michael Patrick King-ian, if you will, to have this similar moment in both of these series. You’re sort of saying people think you have this rubric or template of the show, and you say, “No. Because you think you know it, I'm going to crack it wide open.”

The only thing to do is to keep going forward and not repeat, as a series writer, shaper or showrunner. As long as you keep going forward, whether they accept it or not, you're not dead in the water. There is a moment where a thought comes into your head, like the moment you're talking about in The Comeback where Valerie [Cherish] (Lisa Kudrow’s character) leaves the entire format behind. It was sewed into the fabric that she is never off-camera. The most important thing in her world is how she's coming across on-camera to the world. So Lisa and I were writing it and we were talking about the fact that her hairdresser, Mickey, was sick, and if something would be able to pull her focus away from herself, it would have to be somebody that she loved so much. And all of a sudden I was like, “I don't see TV cameras at that bedside because that's a real thing and it's real life.” I just heard it in my mind: She leaves the cameras behind. And I got Lisa and I said, “She doesn't take the cameras and we [take the] risk.” And she went, “Oh my God. If it works, it's amazing. And if it doesn't work, we ruin the show.” It's a big risk, and what’s more thrilling as somebody who writes or creates stuff than to risk something so big that you could ruin it? At least it's not duplicating. My thing is: Paint yourself into a corner and then, rather than go back over the wet paint, go up the wall. Somehow, find a way to go up the wall.

In the recent show Jury Duty, there's this big reveal in episode 8 where the main character finds out that all of the other characters are, in fact, actors. There was a big reaction to it online and I couldn't help but think of The Comeback and that season finale. I thought, “Well, I've seen this before. I've seen an entire world break down and have to be reconstructed in real time.” I really believe that in so many ways, The Comeback was the blueprint for so much of what we're seeing on television and in media today.

I believe it was the blueprint for a female character who was destroying herself. I mean, this is before The Real Housewives of anything existed. And when Lisa and I pitched the series, we pitched that poster with Valerie standing in a meat grinder in a blue gown and the gown is shredding. That's the premise of the show: She's grinding herself up to make entertainment. That was not on the landscape. I think that's what threw people so much, because Carrie Bradshaw did have deep feelings and dysfunctions and she had a massive affair. She did things that heroines weren't allowed to do on television, like be good and bad. Be right and wrong. Be your friend and the other woman. But, she looked good doing it. And in the end, there was a lot of a sparkle around Carrie in her darkness. There was always a shoe or a bag or something so the audience could go, “Yeah, but look what she's wearing!” 

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “Valerie Cherish’s impact! 🙏”

March 28, 2022

Not so with Valerie Cherish.

With Valerie, it was just bone-on-bone pain. It was just naked need. Lisa never commented. She has the facility as an actor to be something but not tell you with a wink subtextually, “It's going to be okay.” She never commented, she was just in it, and I don't think people knew what to do with that because they didn't know whether it was funny or tragic or both. They really had to have their own Geiger counter or barometer or their own sense of humor, because we thought Valerie was hilarious. For the first five episodes, up until Palm Springs when she said to that guy, “I will pull over and put you off on the side of the road,” no one thought Valerie was going to survive. But we always thought she was hilarious. 

And in the Lincoln Navigator, no less! 

In the Lincoln Navigator! [Laughs] I have to say, that was before anyone was even aware of product placement. “Why are we seeing the front of a car?” But Valerie has the nerve to call it out.

On the subject of Valerie and having talked about Sex and the City a bit, you have these two great female characters that you’ve had such a hand in architecting. Have you ever imagined a world in which Carrie and Valerie exist in the same universe or link up for some reason?

No. Nooo! [Laughs] Literally, if Carrie and Valerie ever met, they would walk by each other on the street without any awareness that the other one existed. Carrie would have no context. We have an episode coming up in [And Just Like That] Season 2 where Carrie actually has a toe dip in the history of show business, and just seeing Carrie talk about show business for a second, you realize it is the furthest thing from her awareness. And because Valerie is not aware of anybody but whoever that the spotlight is on, she would never even see Carrie. She would go, “Well, that's crazy. Taxi!” She’d probably make fun of her outfit or something — if a camera was on. Otherwise, she wouldn't even comment.

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “Dream blunt rotation.”

April 20, 2022

Looking at your resume, you’ve written on: My Talk Show; Hi Honey, I'm Home!; Murphy Brown; Good Advice; and Cybill. There’s a recurring theme in all of these shows, which is that they are all female-led shows — not just shows that have a female lead alongside a male lead. These are female-led shows. When did you first realize that for you — and for me and for many — women rule the roost?

I have three sisters, so let's start there. We’re all very close in age. Having been what we would then call a “sissy” growing up, I didn't have a lot of male friends. So for me, my sisters were my playmates. From a very early age, I would put on shows in the backyard and I would use my sisters and the neighborhood girls to be in them. It would always be some version of a beauty pageant or a religious epic. There was something about the female energy, whether I could get it to cooperate with me more or whether I could dress it up in my mother's bridesmaids gowns that were in the attic, which was my first wardrobe department. There was something very available and creative for me about working with women — so much so that when we were filming the first [SATC] movie and we were outside the New York Public Library and Carrie was in the wedding gown, I was talking to her and I was moving the gown around as we were getting ready to do a shot and I realized, “Oh my God, I'm doing the same thing I did when I was 7 — only instead of [my sisters] Eileen, Mary Ellen and Patty, it's Sarah Jessica, Kristen and Kim.” 

Max just released a video titled “Sex and the City’s Most Iconic Guest Stars.” Before I ask my question though, are you used to calling it Max yet?

Sure, because I've always said HBO Max, HBO Max, HBO Max to keep it in my head. Now it’s just Max. It’s getting trimmed down. It's the Wachovia of it. Just getting thinner. It's going to be just “Mm” soon. Or just “Ax.” Let's just hope it doesn't turn into “Ax.”

Let’s keep it at “Mm.” So Max just released this video of iconic guest stars. Who would you personally put on that list?

Lucy Liu. Lucy Liu was the first person who said, “I'll be me, and I'll be a borderline-opinionated version of me.” David Duchovny, because he was fun to work with and I was in that scene with him in the mental institution and I'm running around yelling “feces” behind him because no other actor could get a laugh the way the writing room would laugh when I pitched it. They were like, “That's not gonna happen.” Then I would say, “This is how funny you could be” and then no one was able to be and I was running around. Speaking of feces, John Slattery wanted to be peed on. [Laughs] We got very lucky. Elizabeth Banks! At some point, everybody moved through there — big and small. It was really fun. Sarah Michelle Gellar came on, and the great flaw of that episode is that when we cast Sarah Michelle and asked her to do that scene, we did not have a guest star yet to play the movie star [in the scene]. So we are filming and we didn't have a name. We were trolling LA, like, “Who can we get?” We were running up to people: “Will you do it? Will you do it?” We didn't have anybody. Eventually, Matthew McConaughey came on and was phenomenal, but we didn't have anybody [at the time of filming]. So I actually had to have Sarah Michelle go, “Guess who's buying your book?” And she [kind of covers her mouth while she says the name] and then we looped in her whispering, “Matthew McConaughey.”

I’ve always wondered about that, so this is scratching an itch that has been gestating for years.

Why would you ever do that unless you didn't have the name? We pretended it was secret. McConaughey was so spectacular. When he showed up, I said to the makeup people, “That's ridiculous. You got to take him down a notch. It's too beautiful. It's ridiculous.” They go, “He doesn't have any makeup on yet.” That's how beautiful he is. He improvised, and our show is usually by the book. So what you're seeing on his side is him free range, going crazy: “Carrie, Big: get down in the primordial mud. Man, woman!” And what you're actually seeing is Sarah Jessica Parker reacting to stuff she's never heard before and it's perfect, because Carrie is in that moment and Sarah Jessica is in that moment and they're both equally thrown. So he was spectacular to come on and play a crazy version of him.

I also love that you did that two-parter in Los Angeles because I thought it gave us a lot of time to explore. I can't drive by what was The Standard West Hollywood now without immediately thinking that while it’s obviously sad that we lost the hotel, it's mostly sad that we lost the site of the cigarette. 

The opening doors, the cigarette, the going back in, the carry-out. Every time I drive by it, I think, “That's where Carrie had one drag of her cigarette and then they went back inside.” And those LA episodes were greatly maligned and people were like, “Meh,” because we left New York. And once again, we did something that was not of the norm, but when you look at those episodes by themselves, they're pretty spectacular in terms of a stunt.

They’re some of my favorites and like I said, I love that you did two episodes because it gave us time to see how much these women are still themselves when you take them out of the City. But the city — the other city — is so different that they feel completely out of sorts in the foreign Los Angeles.

Which brings us really to the whole reason I felt confident doing And Just Like That: When you bring these women into a different environment, they're still themselves. I knew that I had Sarah Jessica, Cynthia and Kristen, and I knew that those characters were really strong and the actress could change depending on what was asked of them and still be those characters. So I thought, “Let's bring them into a different city,” and the city we brought them into was New York in post-pandemic 2022: post-Big, post-Steve, post-single, post-50. So I knew that with those three characters, I could do it and feel confident and build around them.

We saw some characters from the SATC universe enter AJLT. I'm thinking about Bitsy, for instance, and Susan Sharon. I'm not asking for spoilers here, but are there other characters that you are interested in potentially revisiting? The one that comes to mind — that sadly can’t come back — would be Lexi Featherstein.

We're going to grow Anthony. Bitsy's back. Enid’s back, [played by] Candice Bergen — a big deal to come back. And then it's always fun to do a little Easter egg. But the characters that I'm interested in right now are the new ones and how we can grow them and connect them to the original ones. That’s really the journey of the show: How can Carrie be next to Nya? You know those movies about serial killers where they have a wall of all the suspects and there's red yarn going like this and like that? The writing room is like, “How do we connect this one to that one? Where's the connection to that? And that, and that?” It's like this big yarn thoroughfare of how to get these characters together. The reality is that what I'm trying to do with [AJLT] Season 2 is grow the new characters. It’s almost unheard of that you have seven primary characters you're trying to tell in a story, which is why I'm so happy the episodes are on streaming, because they're a little bit super-sized. They’re almost the perfect television time to me, which is 43 minutes. 30 is always too little and 50 is too much. With 43, you can actually get in there, and with 7 characters, you need to get in there. 

Who's killing who this season, Michael?

Hopefully, we're all killing it! Hopefully we're killing it with season 2. My sister [Eileen] just said to me that a woman at her work came into her office and closed the door and says, “Tell me.” And Eileen goes, “What?” And the woman goes, “You know. Tell me. Is he killing Aidan? Tell me!” I'm now the Terminator. Like, “Oh, you loved him? I'll kill him!” My new brand.

You do it one time and suddenly, they're like, “He's the killer!” 

You kill one iconic, can't-kill character and then everybody's on the chopping block!

That’s kind of fun! It keeps audiences on their toes.

There’s nothing I wanna do more than piss fans off.

They’re an easily pissed-off fan base. I think that's just the nature of fandom today. The intensity of fandom — not just with And Just Like That, but in general: There's a protective nature fans feel about shows, but it's funny because they can now go after the people that actually create and write the show online and say, “Wait! You can’t do this! We know better. We’re the fans!”

Well, the idea that people own the show, and the sentence that I found so borderline fun, was: “That’s not my Miranda.” No, it's my Miranda. And here's the thing: You did the re-write on your Miranda. That's not my Miranda. You somehow rewrote this character in your mind because I guess the Sex and the City episodes were on E! and they became just so friendly versus anarchy, which is what the series on HBO was. Miranda was basically an anarchist. “Why do I have to go out with men? Why do I have to wear this? Why do I have to do that? I don't want to marry Steve!” Steve's in the hallway, and she’s like, “Get the fuck up! What are you doing with a ring? That's an ugly ring!” Somehow, in the time when everybody else married their Steve's, they decided Miranda was happy because they want her to be. She didn’t want to go to Brooklyn! She didn't want to get married! She didn’t want a kid! She adapted. So all of a sudden, when she wasn't a happy homemaker, they go, “That's not my Miranda.” And I’m like, “Whoa. It is Miranda to me.” Is it your Miranda? 

Is it my Miranda? I kind of accept that you're the architect here, so where you take me, I will go.

But the fact of the matter is, I'm an architect, but if no one comes into the building, what does it matter?

I'm coming into your building. I’m always coming into your building. You’re Michael Patrick King! I’m in your building. 

The two of us have six names. 

And then our girls, too: Sarah Jessica Parker, Sarah Michelle Gellar. You gotta have three names. Speaking of SJP: I love, love Carrie with Aidan when she does her “you have to forgive me” monologue where she just keeps repeating the phrase. It's one of those quintessentially Carrie moments that just no other character would do. It’s so beautifully her. Are there moments — they can be smaller moments, character-driven moments — that you just look back on and think, “I just love this scene, I love this beat, I love this line.”

There's another Carrie and Aidan moment which is very personal, and it sort of meant something to me when I wrote it, when Aidan crowds in her apartment and the whole episode is about secret single behavior and what you do when you're alone versus when someone's in your world. And she comes in and she says to him at the very end of the episode, “I’ve never lived with anybody before and this might not make any sense, but when I come in here, I don't want you to talk to me for an hour.” And Aidan is quiet and cute in the chair and she closes the curtains that separate the living room from the bedroom and she sits on the bed for 30 seconds and then she goes, “What are you doing?” The idea that somebody just needs to ask for something and be given permission, and her just sitting there and pushing it on Aidan: It's very lush. The voiceover is: “Sometimes when you ask for your needs, you don't need them anymore.” But the idea of Carrie asking for a moment is special. The Carrie-Big moment that I love is when they twist to “Moon River” and she has those jeans on, which [she threw on in] a quick hurry from her house. I love that moment. That's kind of a magical, weird one: the way they twist, and it's sexy and slow.

You mention “Moon River”: I'm going to give you four Sex and the City needle drops, and you tell me which is most significant to you. 1) “Moon River.” 2) “Got to be Real.” 3) “Hot Child in the City.” 4) “Bad Girls.”

“Got to be Real.” Come on! Carrie on the runway? And the best thing about “Got to be Real” is we loved it so much that the credits roll over Carrie in the closet in boy underwear, doing it again. And there's a long pause and at the very end, she opens the door and looks at the camera and it's the only time we've ever said — since early, when Carrie used to talk to the camera — “Look what we're doing! Look at Sarah Jessica, having fun!” She dances down that hallway at the end of the episode after she's fallen and then: She's waiting. I sent her this way till the end of the song, and then told her, “Stick your head out.” [Laughs] There’s no one back there with her! The camera’s just running on an empty closet. So “Got to be Real”: It was pretty significant. Writing a show, if you have a good staff, is everything because it brings so many points of view. And Stanford's line — “Oh, my God! She's fashion roadkill!” — was written in the room. It came out of Eliza Zuritsky’s mouth one of her first couple of weeks there. And I was like, “Wow.”

And the rest is history! Let's talk about 2008 and the first film. I had just moved to New York City in 2007 from Pittsburgh. I was attending NYU. You all were shooting at the Starbucks in Astor Place, and I was asked to be an extra. I was sadly cut out of the film, but I remember how transcendent it was to not only see you and SJP and Jennifer Hudson, but also the hoopla around all day. What was it like for you to shoot that first film and get to witness what I imagine was an even bigger swell than in the final seasons of the show and that excitement that was brewing around the idea that this film was even going to exist?

Filming the first SATC movie in its hometown with its patron saints (those four ladies) was akin to a celebrity petting zoo. I mean, it was: Come see the llamas. They're walking down the street now. There were hundreds of people. The New York Post was publishing our production schedule every night, so when we would show up, there would be hundreds. When we shot the wedding scene in front of [New York Public Library]: hundreds. When we shot the four of them the first time walking down Park Avenue South: hundreds of people. Astor Place: hundreds of people. And so polite, and so reverent. Our assistant director would say on a bullhorn, “Okay, no cheering and no photographing between ‘Action’ and ‘Cut.’” And then I would say, “Action… Cut.” Then: “AHHHH!” It was a carnival, and it was exciting. It was another: “How dare they? They’re making a movie out of a TV show? That's not done. And it's certainly not done to this level.” And then, of course, the underestimating of what that movie would do box office-wise was really thrilling because all the powers that be in the studios who made movies minimalized it as a “lady picture.” And back in the day, they were doing DVD sales and you had to project how much a successful studio thought it would be. And so I was on my DVD call and they said, “We think 15 for the opening weekend,” and I said, “15 what?” and they go, “15 million. What are you thinking?” and I said, “At least 50” and I was laughed off the phone. They just did not think that the audience would show up, and the first weekend was over 60 million and they were like, “Well, we missed the ball.”

Both And Just Like That and The Comeback feature the rare double vomit. As the writer of both, were you conscious of the fact that you were creating another double vomit moment in the canon of television?

The first double vomit moment in The Comeback was a direct mandate based on reality television, because when Lisa and I started creating it, people were vomiting left and right on The Amazing Race. It was just part of the recipe of a reality show, so we knew that it was a contrived event to get Valerie to vomit on television because it would go viral and make her a Jay Leno sensation — which happened. Carrie and Peter vomiting [on AJLT] was a story point to me that had to do with how drunk two widowers had to get in order to have fun. And I just thought the only way to really show that is to have them shit-faced vomit like college kids. And quite frankly, walking around New York City, going down Bleecker Street accidentally on a Saturday, there's always a girl on the curb. Always. There's always a little cobblestone vomit moment. [Chuckles]

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “It is not lost on me that Michael Patrick King, the creator of THE COMEBACK, a show that immortalized the rare double vomit, featured a double vomit on the most recent episode AND JUST LIKE THAT.”

January 14, 2022

You gotta hand it to the actors. Lisa Kudrow hated that vomit so much. She fought me all the way to the finish line. Sarah Jessica just went, “Alright!” And there’s another vomit we tried to do on SATC that was so gross, we had to cut it. 

Say more, will you?

Back in the series, Miranda gets shit-faced drunk with a hot guy and she's so insecure about whether this hot guy wants her that when she goes to bed with him in this script, she's on top of him and she vomits into his mouth. [Laughs] And we filmed it and we had a big tube and Cynthia did it and she's like, “I'm so hot!” And when I saw it, I was like, “We can't. We can't! It's too far.” So in the episode, she wakes up the next day coming out of the hallway and she doesn't know where her belt is and she can't get out, but that was it. With Sarah Jessica and Jon Tenney, we attached hoses to their delicate faces and then they turn away and vomit, and it was impossible. We had the worst effects crew ever. They were these guys from Duck Dynasty. They just kept saying, “We can’t get it right. More vomit!” And they were putting tape on this dress Sarah Jessica was wearing with dirty hands and finally she said, “I can do it. I can do it myself.” They gave her a liter of Dinty Moore and graham crackers and she went — she won't want me saying this — same take, one chamber unloads, she has dialogue and then the rest of [the vomit comes]. So that is an actress deciding they can do it without any special effects. It's miraculous: We didn't have to do any visual effects on that.

Are you aware that the Miranda moment that you're referencing, of her waking up the next morning, is “the next morning, Miranda woke up with the worst hangover of her life”? That's a huge meme, among many of SATC, but that's one of my favorites that circulates from time to time. 

Well, you can imagine what the other meme would have been if it had been allowed to live. [Laughs] I think there's a couple of memes coming up in AJLT S2 that are impossible to not say, “Oh, that's going to be one.” If we're lucky.

Evan Ross Katz on Instagram: “And just like that…”

June 27, 2022

Michael, I will be memeing them — without question. Speaking of which, you are not on social media. Do you ever have an inclination towards or a curiosity about it, or is it just not for you?

[Recently], my partner Craig was like, “You got to be kidding. Get with it!” So he put me on Instagram for a month, and a week into it I liked people less. I had a really good friend who did a post that was [really] long and I was like, “That’s character assassination. You just killed your character for me.” So I was like, “I'd rather not know this. I’d rather not know how self-involved they are, how unfunny they are.” Anything that I need to see gets to me because people make sure I see it. But I also don't want that much active validation/invalidation. When you create content that’s exposed, when you're really in it, you kind of need to be in your own imagination and unplugged. Then, when you launch it like we're doing now, that's when it becomes something. Last year, for the first time in my career, I was completely balanced. [The public was like]: can't live without AJLT, but also wanted to kill me. I was like, “Oh!” It's exciting. [Chuckles] Not to be very aerial about it, but for the first time, it’s very like this: at least people are talking about it. People really work so hard for years to get something done and then they get it done and it goes on and it doesn't make a pulse: People can't find it, they don't know it. And it's heartbreaking for me and for all these writers that work so hard, and these actors and these directors. And they get it right, maybe. And it's invisible. You drive around LA and you see “fourth season finale of ___” and you’re like, “What? I never even saw the first season! Where is it?” It's hard for a creator, but I guess social media certainly helps.

And to your point, I feel like no one is not talking about AJLT. It's just a show that evokes emotion from people very strongly in the most fabulous way, and that's why I think people are so excited to see more of the show and where it will go. But going back to The Comeback: You have Season 1 in 2005, then Season 2 in 2014. If I'm mathing the math, that would mean 2023: The Comeback Season 3! I know you've got a lot on your plate. This is an unrealistic question, I understand.

Valerie Cherish is an oil well that never goes dry for me. Never. Lisa has been in New Zealand working with Taika Waititi so she's been preoccupied, but every now and then we float something to each other and she has a very interesting window of what actualizes the march forward. I can have 15 ideas of Valerie, and we just keep waiting to see the one that we both click [with]. Look, she's never not going to be funny and she's never not going to be tragic because she's never going to get younger or closer to stardom than she did in “Seeing Red.” So it just feels so interesting where the world is. And I'll tell you that the closest we came to something recently was: Remember during the beginning of the pandemic, like 5 weeks in, when all the original sitcoms were doing readings of the pilot? We were like, “Can you imagine tone-deaf Valerie getting together a reading of ‘I’m It!’ with the original actors? But like — ‘cause she's not diligent at all — never having read it and then getting to what television in that era would have said about women and people of color and to be on-camera saying that?” We were like, “That’s a thing.” Valerie doing a Zoom reading of “I’m It!” It would have been a thing, but it just went by so fast.

Also, just Valerie operating Zoom, not realizing that the camera was still on! 

We already did that! Valerie not realizing the cameras were on when Mark's taking a shit or not realizing the cameras were on when she's yelling at someone about why isn't this camera on. Valerie was already Zooming before it existed! [Laughs]

Right! A bit of an esoteric question to wrap us up with: Despite the fact that The Comeback is this very broad comedy, it's quite grounded. I think about her loving husband. I think about her wardrobe and how gorgeous her costumes were; the kind of things that a woman would be envious of. I think that that is so different than a lot of today's comedy, which is just very ‘swing for the fence.’ That’s not to say today's comedy is bad, but I think part of why The Comeback always stays on my mind is because the jokes are so much funnier because of how grounded the world that Valerie exists in is. For instance, I think about that binder that she has with the takeout restaurants in during Season 1; those details of the practicalities and the reality of being Valerie. And let’s talk about the pilot: the water in the wall. This is just the shit that happens, and it makes everything else so much funnier. What sort of trends are you seeing in comedy, and do you think that we've gotten a little too absurdist? I just miss the specificity of a show like The Comeback. 

I see a tendency towards a comment on a comment. Everything seems to have quotes around it. Every character has a quote around it. No one's a mean agent; they’re a “mean agent.” And I'm speaking in mass generalizations: There are amazing things that are out there, but what I'm seeing as the trend or the pulse is something that's a little above reality and almost above believing it. It's like they don't want to believe it, and if they don't believe it they can't get caught doing it. I've had a couple of interesting experiences with younger directors: When they hand me their cut, they shy away from the laugh. It's almost as if they don't want to spike: They want to not look like they're trying to be funny. There's a weird [pattern of] not wanting to get caught and asking to be liked, or asking, “I hope you think this is good. We did it all for you.” And: “We're not really doing this. These aren't really real people. This is just us doing a spin on something. And if you don't like it, we don't even believe it!” 

It's a protective nature. It is sort of risk-averse in a sense, right? Because if I don't overly invest in something, then I can't get my heart broken, or when people criticize it, I don't have to take full ownership of it because I wasn't fully in the water.

I think it's also incredibly skilled. I'm not saying that any of these people can't do that: It's like they don't want to get caught asking for you to invest in their work, so instead they're maybe 1/8 out, and then they’re 7/8 in. There's always a step out. With Valerie and The Comeback, she was all in. I believe there has to be gravity in a show in order for people to really be shocked or laugh. If somebody dies, they have to die. If somebody says something mean to somebody, there needs to be a chemical reaction from somebody else. You can't just pretend. It's not writing: It's real life. It's written, but it's behaving in the science laws that we know and the reality of The Comeback was real. As a matter of fact, when we were doing the episode when Valerie goes to the writers’ hut with cookies at night and they're doing pretending they're having sex with her and they have a red hoodie on and they're all making fun of her and she catches them and they freak out, I actually turned to the director and I said, “This is a documentary. I'm doing a documentary about what I know about television writing and writers and actors.” So I always believed it was a documentary. It was real, and then Lisa played everything as though it was absolutely real. Sarah Jessica plays everything as though it's real. All the actors play stuff as though it's real. And then the writing lifts sometimes into the place where you then say, “Here are my top five moments.” But it reflects reality, and I think if there's any reason people are still watching Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte, it's because they still feel they’re real somewhere because they've gone from 34 to 56 [years old] with them.

Michael: In the realest way, I miss Valerie. She's on my mind. She's someone that I think about in a strangely specific way: situations where I become Valerie for a moment when I react to a situation in life, where she manifests inside of me.

I’ll tell you something: When Lisa and I wrote the second season, we were in a room all day long writing. We would write Valerie and we'd figure out the stories and she would hit the template and we’d be like, “Oh! More of that!” and it was just Lisa doing Valerie. And we hadn't seen Valerie since Season 1 — which was 9 years earlier — so we had to do a hair and makeup test to see what Valerie looks like now. And we also were concerned: Had Valerie aged? What do we have to write about it? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So we were in hair and makeup and I turn around and Valerie's coming at me, and I got shy. I had just been in a room for three months with Lisa doing Valerie, but all of a sudden, I saw Valerie, and it's like it’s lit up from inside and it was Valerie and I missed her. Even though I had been with Lisa writing her, there's a metamorphosis that happens when she becomes Valerie — not to get very spiritual about it, but there's like another entity that enters her and it was thrilling and it took my breath away because she is a real thing.

You’ve got a lot of stories in you. Are we ever getting the MPK memoir?

Oh, I don't know. Probably. I don't know. Look, it's been a great adventure. We've gone from a little tiny show on HBO, which was a fights and stand-up channel [at the time], to being told we had to leave Dubai because the Sheikh didn't want us filming there and he was upset that these characters even existed. It's been a very big journey and it's really thrilling to still be working with some people that have been there all along. And I'm Irish and I love to tell stories, so who knows?

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