James ‘returns’ home with CBS sitcom Kevin Can Wait

‘Jones’ hires women directors

NEW YORK, Oct 23, (Agencies): With “Kevin Can Wait”, Kevin James has come home.

Home to the tried-and-true sitcom form with which he thrived for nine seasons on “The King of Queens”.

Home to CBS, where “King” enjoyed its long run and where “Kevin Can Wait” arrived this fall (airing Mondays at 8:00 pm EDT).

And home to James’ native Long Island, from where his new show originates.

Though set in the New York City borough of Queens, “The King of Queens” was filmed 2,500 miles away in Los Angeles. But for his return to series television, James wanted to be true to his roots. Not even a studio in nearby Queens would satisfy him.

“I said, ‘If I can do my show on Long Island, then I’ll do it’”, he explains.

As its robust audience already knows, “Kevin Can Wait” centers on a Long Island husband and father named Kevin who, newly retired from the police force, finds himself to be an unwitting invader on the home front.

“My wife (played by co-star Erinn Hayes) has already established what’s going on at home”, James laughs, “and when you’re retired and back home full-time, you’re disrupting all that. You can say, ‘I’ll set the rules now.’ But the cement is dry!”

James, 51, was raised in the Long Island hamlet of Stony Brook, and now he’s out to capture the feel of working-class Long Island life that, through his own disarming regular-guyness, he embodies both on- and off-camera.

Character

“We want to make Long Island a character in the show, and we’re using it for exterior shots”, he says. And even though the majority of the action is filmed in multi-camera style on a Bethpage, Long Island, soundstage, James loves knowing that local folks who can readily relate to the show’s zany dilemmas comprise each week’s studio audience: “I love that energy”.

Clearly, James has gained a measure of experience in how to be the boss yet still relax. This is in marked contrast to the rising young standup who scored his first sitcom back in 1998.

“On ‘The King of Queens’, I showed up as this green kid who tried to control things”, he recalls. “You get so panicked, constantly looking over your shoulder, checking if we’re gonna get canceled. This time, my fingerprints are all over it — writing, wardrobe, everything — but I’m also having fun. I want this show to connect, because I love it. But I’ve done it already, and we had a great run”.

Maybe history is repeating itself. In any case, CBS didn’t wait long to give “Kevin Can Wait” a full-season order.

But even with popular acceptance, James knows better than to clear his shelves for Emmys and other shiny hardware. In 2006, James’ portrayal of a parcel delivery guy sharing a Queens household with his wife and her aging father snagged the show its lone Emmy nomination.

James isn’t betting on that to change now in response to this latest twist on the everyman persona he’s also served fans in his hit 2009 film “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” and in “True Memoirs of an International Assassin”, his new Netflix action comedy where he stars as a mild-mannered novelist who gets mistaken for a killer-for-hire. (It premieres Nov 11.)

All 13 episodes of the second season of “Marvel’s Jessica Jones” will be directed by women, according to executive producer and showrunner Melissa Rosenberg.

Rosenberg discussed the all-female directing roster during her panel at Transforming Hollywood 7: Diversifying Entertainment, a conference held Friday at University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Rosenberg said that in the second season of the superhero show, she had wanted to increase the number of female directors — a goal that Marvel was completely on board with, she noted. Given how in-demand many women directors are these days, she and her fellow producers had set their sights on booking women first, she said, and contracting male directors later in the pre-production process.

But then someone else involved in the production — she didn’t specify who — floated the idea of booking only women as directors. Rosenberg was honest about the fact that she hadn’t contemplated that concept prior to that conversation, but she said she quickly jumped at the opportunity.

When it comes to behind-the-scenes personnel, hiring an inclusive array of people was “a conscious decision and it’s very important that showrunners do that”, she said.

That directing roster puts “Jessica Jones” in very rarified company, as one of the few onehour dramas to have an all-female list of directors. Ava DuVernay’s “Queen Sugar”, which airs on OWN, also had only female directors during its debut season.