Michael Patrick King prays Hollywood doesn't get dumb enough to justify another season of The Comeback

King was acknowledging the slightly unconventional timing of the show’s three seasons, which have arrived roughly every decade since the series debuted back in 2005. When the show’s second season arrived back in 2014, it did so in a world being reshaped by the new waves of reality television; the 2026 revival, meanwhile, has been driven almost entirely by King and Kudrow channeling writers’ anxieties about AI. 

Interestingly, King says that the show—which returned with Kudrow’s Valerie being asked to star in a sitcom completely “written” by artificial intelligence—very deliberately raced to air with its AI storyline, because “We’re still in that moment before any studio actually admits they’re using AI, which was our main goal to get on television before that moment happened. That was why we worked so hard to get the show out so it could feel still a little bit ahead of whenever that news is gonna come.”

Despite its strangely cyclical energy, though, King says he never intended to bring the series, and Valerie, back every 10 years, and that he and Kudrow are pretty firm about the show now being done. “This is the finale of the series,” he asserted. “It feels like the trilogy. Lisa keeps saying it’s a trilogy because it has three pieces, and it feels like beginning, middle and end for us. We never intended to have our brand be, every 10 years, we come back. But now to come back in two years would be ridiculous. So, I don’t foresee that far in the future, but we really, really feel very happy about this being the finale of the series.”