Not one to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, King jumped straight into another project, directing the mock reality series The Comeback, which he cowrote and cocreated with Lisa Kudrow. The show, in which Kudrow starred as Valerie Cherish, an aging TV sweetheart who’d do anything to stay in the spotlight, was well reviewed, but audiences seemed to find Valerie’s desperation just too cringe-inducing. “It was ahead of its time,” says King, with obvious disappointment, of the series, which lasted only one season. “But there were people who loved it. One day I got a call from David Bowie. He was going out of the country and wanted to know what happened to Valerie.”
King didn’t have too much time to wallow. In 2006 Parker finally decided to throw her weight behind the Sex and the City film, and King, feeling his original outline no longer worked, came up with a new script. “Of course, he went off and wrote a five-hour movie,” Parker says, laughing. “He always goes big. He’s got an ego that way.”
Returning to the world of Carrie and company, says King, feels like a homecoming: “I love these characters. They were always alive for me.” And though he’s tight-lipped about the film’s plot, he’s happy to share the underlying message. “One of the themes is that your 20s become 40s, and you’re still whoever you are,” King says, in a rare moment of quiet reflection—which he quickly turns into a modified stand-up routine, unwittingly demonstrating that the generalization applies to himself. “Only two things change when you get older: the energy in your voice and the time of night you feel it’s appropriate to call someone. In your 20s, people call at 2 a.m. and yell, ‘Are you up?’ into the answering machine. Now, someone calls after 8 p.m., and my boyfriend is like, ‘Who is that? Who could be calling at this hour?’”
