THE ‘WAIT’ IS OVER

James, Remini ‘remarried’ after 10 years

KEVIN James wraps a successful first season of “Kevin Can Wait” in very familiar sitcom waters.

Monday night’s season finale, the second of a two-part episode, is dubbed “Sting of Queens” — pairing James with Leah Remini, his co-star on “The King of Queens” for all nine seasons of the CBS sitcom (1998-2007).

James says he always hoped a reunion with Remini would happen — and that the two-part “KCW” season-ender provided the perfect opportunity. “I wouldn’t say that we had [the idea] when we opened the show, but I always knew that I wanted to work with Leah again,” he says. “How could we do that? I always felt like we needed to do it in a way that felt organic to the show, like, how can we get Leah on where she’s not just a character working in a deli who I meet for the first time — and then we gotta get to know each other?

“We played husband and wife [on ‘The King of Queens’], so that opened it up.”

In last week’s episode, ex-cop Kevin Gable (James) came out of retirement to reteam with his former partner, Vanessa Cellucci (Remini) in an undercover operation, as husband and wife. “Kevin was an undercover cop with Vanessa before and she was the wife, so it felt right,” James says. “It clicked. It would’ve been fine if she was a deli worker or something like that, but this felt right, and was something we could do for our fans.”

In Monday night’s episode (8 p.m./CBS), Vanessa strong-arms Kevin into attending a fraudulent dealer’s art show in Boston — with farcical repercussions.

“It felt like riding the bicycle again,” he says of reuniting with Remini. “I felt like it was 10 years earlier; it felt so similar to those days [on ‘The King of Queens’]. It’s like we never stopped and just picked up where we left off.”

And, he says, there’s “absolutely” a chance that Remini could return to “Kevin Can Wait” down the road. “It was important to me that we had that possibility,” he says.

In the meantime, he’ll spend this summer fine-tuning his comedy act for his Netflix standup special, filming Oct. 28 and 29 at The Beacon Theater. “I haven’t done [standup] in three or four months, so the first couple of shows I was very rusty,” he says. “It wasn’t something the audience would notice, but I noticed it in my timing. But when you tour, you start to hit your stride.

“That’s the key.”