An Outrageous Voice of ‘Sex and the City’

Michael Patrick King’s job is enough to make a mother proud. Proud and a little red-faced. King is the executive producer of the saucy HBO hit comedy series “Sex and the City,” but he’s also the product of an Irish Catholic family that never discussed sex, he says.

Now King’s mother, a former manager of a Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop in Scranton, Pa., finds herself having previously unimaginable graphic conversations with her show-business son. “Her love of me is only slightly bigger than her shame [over] the idea of the show,” King says.

Nominated for an Emmy as best comedy series for the second time in three seasons, “Sex and the City,” created by Darren Star and based on the urban tales of former New York Observer columnist Candace Bushnell, has become a water-cooler show for women (assuming, that is, that women hang out at water coolers).

The series stars Sarah Jessica Parker as relationship columnist Carrie and co-stars Cynthia Nixon, Kim Cattrall and Kristin Davis as Carrie’s upscale gal pals; like cultural anthropologists working on one long research project, the women sample various men and then convene for lunch, at which the ribald conversation is conducted at “McLaughlin Group”-like speed.

This season, “Sex and the City” has grown out of its surface conceits; the plots have thickened (Carrie finds a dream guy, then ruins things by taking up with Mr. Big, a former flame); and the show, whose four femmes were featured on the cover of Time, has become something of a rarity, a sitcom people talk about.

You don’t have to spend much time with King to hear the show’s voice--that crackle and pop about relationships and Prada products, the frank talk about sex that makes the show empowering to some and merely a collection of crass, feminized jokes to others (in addition to King and Star, the show’s small writing staff this season included Jenny Bicks and Cindy Chupack).

With creator and fellow executive producer Star nurturing two other shows into existence (the WB comedy “Grosse Pointe” and the Fox drama “The $treet”), King has been busy, having written six episodes this season and directed two others.

His success didn’t happen overnight. King arrived in New York two decades ago as an aspiring actor, became a playwright and a stand-up comic, dabbled in improv, eventually moved to L.A. to write for television and came out as a gay man, got jobs on “Murphy Brown” and “Cybill,” created the very short-lived sitcom “Temporarily Yours,” opened the Arcade theater in Culver City and consulted on the first season of the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” (the quick-witted King worked during tapings, punching up scenes on the fly).

King, 41, who also has a deal with HBO to create a show of his own, was in Los Angeles recently to shoot two “Sex and the City” episodes with guest appearances by Carrie Fisher, Matthew McConaughey, Vince Vaughn and Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Question: The way the women on the show talk about sex strikes some as offensive or unrealistic. If nothing else, “Sex and the City” has touched off a debate: Do women really talk like this? Some point to you and Darren Star and say the show is really a gay man’s view of sex and relationships, your sensibilities filtered through four women.

Answer: I’ve heard that. Occasionally I’ve heard it from writers. . . . What I hear from women is, “This is real. This is my girlfriends and me.” . . . I also write Mr. Big. I also write Steve the bartender. I don’t hear people saying Mr. Big is a character written by gay guys. It’s just a thing to say.

There’s an outrageousness to [the show]. But I don’t know necessarily if that’s a gay outrageousness, or just an outrageousness. . . . Maybe the gay profile is something that’s on the edge, so that’s what people are perceiving as gay. I don’t know. I mean, I’m writing four characters. . . . You can get four straight people to write this show badly, or you can get four gay guys to write it worse.

It’s not about, “Oh, Michael Patrick King is a gay writer.” It’s about, “Somehow he understands the dynamic of these four characters.” When it works. I mean, believe me, if this show is the right show for me to write, it’s not because I’m gay. It’s because I understand something about emotions.

Q: When people say “Sex and the City” has a “gay sensibility,” do you think they’re referring to all the references to male genitalia and shopping? Isn’t that insulting?

A: I wish it was about two men writing about shopping and [penises], because I would have been home hours ago. I don’t think people would be watching a show about shopping and [penises]. I think maybe they’d watch 20 minutes of it once and go, “What?”

If they’re watching, it’s because there’s something connected to something that everybody feels. And it doesn’t have to do with being a woman or living in New York, it has to do with the war zone of being emotionally available for a relationship. . . .

[When] there’s huge parties in Houston, Texas, every time the show’s on Sunday night, and there’s 500 women in the room going, “Yeah!” I don’t think they’re applauding my ability to match outfits. I think they’re applauding my ability to go, “That’s life.” They’re not applauding a gay sensibility. They’re applauding a bravery or a craziness or an outrageousness or a daring that has to do with “I can’t believe you’re saying that.”

Q: So the show is about more than four women sleeping around and being in control of who they do it with and when?

A: It’s about what sex does to people, in terms of exposing them. And the episodes where people don’t have sex, which you’ll see a lot of, [are] about what that means. And the fun thing about this show is that we’re able to actually go into the world of sex, and not in a bull---- way. In a funny way. . . .

That’s the selling piece of the show, that you’re maybe going to see something about sex, but I defy you to find one scene in our show that’s about you getting turned on when you’re watching it. There’s not one sexual scene in our show.

Q: Wait a minute. There are lots of sex scenes. Kim Cattrall has sex practically every week.

A: What sex scenes? They’re all about the girls getting a huge cream pie at the end. There’s not one single nudity scene in our show that doesn’t have a laugh attached.

Q: How about when Carrie was having flashbacks to having sex with Big?

A: That’s the only time in three years that you’ve ever seen anything to sell passion. Samantha [Cattrall], who is considered the crazy sexual one, is never in a sexual situation that isn’t funny. If she’s [having sex] on a firetruck, it’s with Handel’s “Messiah” underneath it. It’s never about, “Ooh, aren’t you getting turned on at home?”

Q: Single people like to complain that’s it’s hard to meet people. But that’s not something the women on “Sex and the City” struggle with.

A: What our show says is it’s so hard to meet someone who’s not crazy or [messed] up. I mean, that’s the fun of it. Even if you have a Versace wardrobe and you’re a star and you look like a million bucks, it’s really hard to meet a guy. Kim Cattrall can’t meet a guy. That says a lot about how hard it is to meet a guy for women who are not Kim Cattrall. . . .

To me it’s just about, what kind of obstacles can we put in front of these women to bring up the stuff that everybody feels emotionally in life? What kind of guy can we put in front of Miranda to work out the fact that she’s judgmental, bitter and shut down? . . . Of course, everyone knows that no one has that much sex. But it’s an adventure. It’s “Alice in Wonderland.”

Q: It is refreshing that Carrie’s two lovers this season, Aidan (John Corbett) and Big (Christopher Noth), aren’t in great shape.

A: What 40-year-old straight man has abs who isn’t an actor? None. Why? They don’t have to. . . . Forty-year-old bachelors do not have those bodies. Forty-year-old actors do, because they have to take their clothes off. Forty-year-old men do not, and they don’t have to, because they have something bigger than abs. They’re straight and they’re available.

Q: If the show wins the Emmy this year as best comedy series, I suspect there will be grumbling [that] HBO, with its fewer content restrictions, gives you guys an unfair advantage over broadcast network competition.

A “Will and Grace” is hilarious. And they just don’t say [expletive]. They say dirtier stuff. . . . They just are clever [about it]. If we do win the Emmy it’s not about because we can [swear], it’s that people are recognizing that there’s something unique here. It’s really about doing something a new way, or a way that seems more like real life.

Q: What’s the writing process like on “Sex and the City,” and how does it differ from the writers’ rooms on network shows?

A: We have an interesting process. We get together at the beginning of the season . . . and we think, “What do we think the season might be [about],” and we pull in secret weapons. Like we had [humorist] Merrill Markoe at the beginning of the second season, just to come in and sit and talk, and she wrote a script. But I find women or people who I think are interesting and have something to say, who I know we’re not going to take to New York, but we plow up the dirt. . . . The whole goal this season was, what if it wasn’t a TV show? What would really happen? What if [Carrie] did something bad, like have an affair with a married man, what if he came back, what would happen, she wouldn’t be able to resist him. Whereas you’re not allowed to ask that [question] on network.

Q: Do you think audiences have grown weary of conventional sitcoms? Or are we just between hits? And do you agree with many writers that the development process is stifling good work?

A: When I was on “Murphy Brown,” everybody had an individual voice. That was sort of the way [executive producer] Diane [English] did it. She hired writers that she thought were interestingly individual, and then she sat at the head of the table and took the best of everybody’s voice. It was never about a room voice. It was about individual voices, and therefore everyone who came off that show when I was there became an individual writer.

People would say, “Let’s get Peter Tolan. Let’s get Tom Palmer.” And then we went through a phase, right around “Must-See TV”--and I’m not talking about “Friends”--but then it became, “You can put anything on that block.” And then somebody started thinking, “Well, you don’t need voices, you just need product. And it really doesn’t matter who writes it; just get it up.” . . . And now everyone’s really sick of the product, and there’s no voices, so people like [“Malcolm in the Middle” creator] Linwood Boomer, the voices are coming back. . . . I think nobody’s watching the joke-to-joke-to-joke shows anymore.