In this FX original comedy series,Louis C.K. stars as a successful stand-up comedian and newly single father raising two daughters in New York.
TV Reviews
Posted: Sat., Jun. 26, 2010, 4:00am PT
Recently Reviewed
Louie
(Series -- FX, Tues. June 29, 11 p.m.)
By Brian Lowry
Filmed in New York by Pig Newton and 3 Arts Entertainment in association with FX Prods. Executive producers, Louis C.K., Dave Becky, M. Blair Breard; line producer, Tony Hernandez; producer, Jon Stern; writer-director-editor, Louis C.K.;
With: Louis C.K.
After "Lucky Louie" rolled snake-eyes on HBO, Louis C.K. is back with another raunchy half-hour, here with a "Seinfeld"-like formula: Each episode of the comic's FX series features clips from his stand-up act, while presenting a pair of scripted vignettes loosely related to his material. The format proves uneven, but after watching four episodes there's a lot to like in "Louie" -- beginning with using "Brother Louie" as its theme song -- though most of the best stuff comes following the so-so pilot.
Divorced, in his early 40s and raising two daughters, Louis C.K.'s dour outlook on life pretty well permeates his act. He describes bringing home a new puppy -- given the animal's inevitable death -- as a "countdown to sorrow."
Translating that to TV, however, isn't exactly easy, and the operation can't be ruled a complete success. In the premiere, he tries to take his kids on a field trip that goes terribly wrong, but the gag sort of runs out of gas, as does a secondary bit in which he goes on an awkward first date.
Matters improve, thankfully, in subsequent episodes, where the vignettes include a poker game among comics and C.K.'s trip to the doctor, played with wild-eyed abandon by Ricky Gervais. After asking his patient to strip naked, Gervais' doc yells for the nurse, calling Louie's penis "the worst thing that ever happened to me, seeing that, and my dad hung himself in front of me -- whilst masturbating."
Mostly, Louie ambles through life ready to be disappointed at every turn, whether that's connecting with an old high-school crush via Facebook, visiting his shrink (almost as weird as his M.D.), or having a divorced mom (Pamela Adlon, who played Louie's wife in his HBO show and serves as a consulting producer on this one) bring her kid for a play date with Louie's girls.
FX has scheduled the show at 11 p.m., allowing C.K. (who wrote, directed and edited the pilot) to be about as blue as he can in an ad-supported space. The nice part about "Louie" is that its loose structure creates ample possibilities, while its grainy vision of New York approximates the feel of an independent film.
For all that, the laughs come only intermittently, and the sequences of our hapless hero doing stand-up are generally superior to his limitations as an actor. In addition, the vignettes that do click sometimes seem underdeveloped given the scant time devoted to them in what's basically an anthology format, with Louie as the one constant.
Known for pushing the dramatic envelope, FX has struggled to replicate that appeal in comedy, though recent series like "The League" and the animated "Archer" come close. By that measure, "Louie" is a savvy addition to the channel's macho bullpen, even if the show thus far provides less cause to celebrate than, say, a new puppy.
camera, Paul Koestner; production designer, Amy Silver; music, Reggie Watts; casting, Gayle Keller, Ann Goulder. 30 MIN.
A Review from The New York Times
Television Review | 'Louie'
Louie
Life After Divorce (Don’t Ask About the Monkeys)
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: June 28, 2010
Personal ads in newspapers and on Web sites don’t usually hold out a lot of demand for the SWML, but comedy has nothing but time for the single white male loser.
So the stand-up comic Louis C. K., who plays a divorced stand-up comedian with two daughters on “Louie,” a new comedy on FX that begins on Tuesday, has a daunting task: He must make his own brand of wry, self-deprecating and X-rated humor stand out.
His comedy follows a tradition that traces beyond Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” George on “Seinfeld” or even Woody Allen. Charlie Chaplin was the standout loser of silent film, and even Shakespeare had a soft spot for sad sacks.
Comedians are everywhere nowadays, not just on Comedy Central, but also all over cable and the Internet. There are so many kinds of stand-up comedy and almost no restrictions left on content. Yet the classic depressive, self-hating loner — adrift in the big city, out of shape and out of bounds — never seems to go out of style, or even evolve.
Louis C. K.’s routine mostly take a wickedly scatological look at life after divorce — raising children, dating and aging — but his delivery is low key and even diffident. He is funniest as a stand-up when he takes a step away from his bawdy comic riffs to poke holes ruefully in his own discourse.
On one episode of “Louie,” he is onstage delivering a disquisition about having sex with animals. “I really think if I was alone on the earth, no other humans, I would have sex with a monkey in like two minutes.” He stops, and laughs scoffingly, not at zoophilia, but at his time allowance. “Two minutes,” he snorts. “That’s really not long enough to be sure you are alone on the earth.”
As a comedian and writer Louis C. K. (he was born Louis Szekely) has a loyal following and an impressive pedigree. He has worked for David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Chris Rock, made appearances on almost all the late-night shows from Jay Leno’s to Jimmy Kimmel’s, and starred in his own HBO comedy specials.
In 2006 he had an HBO sitcom, “Lucky Louie,” in which he played a dispirited working-class father of two who is bossed around by a spitfire wife, a nurse who is the family’s prime breadwinner. It was filmed with three cameras in front of an audience like a classic sitcom, and was essentially a “King of Queens” with black humor and blue jokes. When his tiny daughter pesters him for answers to big questions, Louie gets impatient and replies, “because God is dead, and we are alone.” It lasted one season.
“Louie,” is just as bleakly satiric, perhaps more so, but in a less forced format. As in “Seinfeld,” the star’s comedy routines bracket the narrative. This incarnation of Louie performs in a club, and a punch line about school, say, or masturbation dissolves into a vignette, filmed in bleached, subdued colors, that is thematically linked.
On the pilot episode Louie is a volunteer chaperon on his daughter’s field trip to the New York Botanical Garden and gets into a Larry Davidish confrontation with an incompetent bus driver. The bus gets stuck in Harlem, and Louie, worried about the neighborhood, makes the children change seats so the darkest ones are next to the window.
In the same episode he goes on a disastrous first date with a bossy and contemptuous young woman. When he leans in for a kiss on a park bench near the river, she is so repelled that she runs away and leaps into a departing helicopter — a surreal touch that seems like a homage to early Woody Allen movies.
Doing stand-up, Louis C. K. can be animated and sometimes laughs gently along with the audience. But in scenes in which he interacts with the world, he speaks slowly and tonelessly, a little like the comedian Steven Wright. And that’s one of the problems with the show: so much of it echoes familiar comic works.
There is a funny scene in the fourth episode: Louie is picked up after a performance by a young, beautiful woman who claims she is turned on by older men, because, she says, they have “given up” and smell weird. When Louie asks what she means by weird, the young woman leans in and sniffs his neck. “I don’t know,” she replies. “Like dying? It’s sexy.”
In bed she demands sex talk — about his advanced age. “I remember going to movies when it cost $3,” he pants. “I remember smoking in airplanes. I had a vein removed from my leg last year.” She writhes in ecstasy. “Yes!” she cries. “So did my mom. Don’t stop.”
It takes a while for “Louie” to find its own voice, and while it is at times a crude and offensive one, it is not without a strange wit and under-the-radar appeal. Louis C. K. is a comedian’s comedian, but that shouldn’t prevent audiences — mature and immature — from appreciating his work.
Louie
FX, Tuesday nights at 11, Eastern and Pacific times; 10, Central time.
Created, written, directed and edited by Louis C. K. Louis C. K., M. Blair Breard, Dave Becky and 3 Arts Entertainment, executive producers; Pamela Adlon, consulting producer. Produced by FX Productions.
A Review from The LA Times
Television review: 'Louie' on FX
Philosophy suffuses the punch lines in comedian Louis C.K.'s series about a guy much like himself who's acutely aware of decay and mortality.
June 29, 2010|By Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times Television Critic
Can there be comedy without pain? Possibly. Chickens would still cross roads and suspenders would keep firemen's pants up, even though it would be funnier if they fell down. You might still be glad I didn't say banana.
Yet since ancient man first slipped on a banana peel, comedy and misfortune have traveled hand in hand. Shakespeare's clowns got mileage from the darker facts of human existence:
Fool: If thou wert my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.
Lear: How's that?
Fool: Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise — thanks, I'm here all week.
Louis C.K., the comedian, has a new series on FX called "Louie," and it is very much about being old before becoming wise — though at 42, C.K. is not as old as all that, and the comedy process seems, for him at least, a path toward something like wisdom, if not necessarily wisdom he'll manage to apply to his own life.
C.K.'s previous series, HBO's "Lucky Louie," which ran for 12 episodes in 2006, was an attempt to move the three-camera sitcom out of the family-friendly comfort zone with explicit language, unspeakable attitudes and sex jokes that didn't bother with innuendo. The new show, which bleeps a few words — but does make extensive uncensored use of the "sh"-word, lately popping up all over basic cable — is less obviously provocative, more cutting and interesting and structurally subtle. This is in part because the star is not playing an extreme take on a TV type (harried family man) but is offering a representation of himself, one that seems philosophically authentic if not completely factual. (He's probably not as hopeless a date as he portrays himself here, but he is indeed a recently divorced comic with two young daughters.)
Bald and flabby, he speaks of being past his peak, but age suits his comedy, which is rooted in an awareness of physical decay and unavoidable loss in a way that's both depressing and freeing. (That is what comedy is for, I suppose.) He has the body he wants, he says; the trick is "you have to want your own … ugly, disgusting body." And he's adapted for a theme song the refrain from "Brother Louie": "Louie, Louie, you're gonna die."
"Everything that makes you happy is going to end," C.K. says, "and nothing ends well." He sees in a new puppy the ashes of its eventual demise. ("There you go. Countdown to sorrow with a puppy.") Even the happiest marriage will come to dust: "You get old together, and then she's going to die — that's the best-case scenario." The punch line: "So that's why it's hard to start dating."
This is funny in the way that slipping on a banana peel or walking into a post is funny — that is, not actually funny at all: "I think a lot of people who think they're good people are living a really evil life without thinking about it," says C.K. "The whole premise of my life is evil." He could sell his expensive car and buy a good cheap one and with the money left over "save hundreds of people from dying of starvation. ... And every day I don't do it. Every day I make them die with my car." That laughter of the crowd is the desired effect, of course, but it's also strange that they do.
The show alternates between scenes of stand-up (at New York's Comedy Cellar) and shaggy-dog short stories centered on a school field trip, a play date for his kids, a fumbling date (which ends with Chelsea Peretti escaping him in a helicopter, a gag he's used elsewhere), a brawl with a friend, a poker game, a visit to the doctor. Most don't head anywhere in particular — that's not a criticism — and float along on the nimble, naturalistic work of a revolving cast of guest players, including Pamela Adlon, who played C.K.'s wife in the HBO series (and is a producer here), Nick DiPaolo and Ricky Gervais.
Not everything in "Louie" works equally well — it is strenuously weird at times, and it will generally test your tolerance for the white heterosexual male's joking unease with everything not white, heterosexual and male. But it isn't dull, and it feels original and honest. C.K. himself does aspire to being a better, fairer human, or at least to understanding how he fails at it.
"I know too much about life to have any optimism," he says, but the fact that he's showing up to talk seems to suggest otherwise.
A Review from The Boston Globe
‘Louie’ has feelings, not all rude and crude
June 29, 2010|Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff
There’s a good scene at the start of tonight’s second episode of “Louie,’’ Louis C.K.’s new FX comedy series. Louie and some of his comedian buddies are playing poker and talking smack, when Louie asks the one gay guy at the table, Rick Crom, if he’s offended by the word “faggot.’’ Crom says no, but explains that faggot meant kindling wood in the Middle Ages, and that homosexuals were thrown onto burning faggots along with witches. They weren’t deemed worthy of stakes.
The table of men quiets down, before the jokes start coming again in a hail of discomfort. But a lot has happened. Crom was not defensive, and the other men heard him. He did not give them the opportunity to sneer at political correctness — he just gave them the pure ugliness of the story. “Louie,’’ which premieres tonight with two episodes at 11, isn’t a learning-and-hugging show by any means; but amid all of C.K.’s cocky bluster and politically incorrect language, there are plenty of rich moments of respite, when people with polarized world views actually hear and like one another. Rather than just a screed against political correctness, “Louie’’ has a few interesting layers.
In structure, “Louie’’ bears a glancing resemblance to “Seinfeld.’’ C.K. plays a version of himself, and each episode toggles back and forth between his stand-up routine and scripted, single-camera vignettes from his life. Louie is a divorced father of two in New York City, dealing with the physical and psychological strains of being in his 40s. Onstage, he talks about the awkwardness of returning to the dating world, then we see him on an excruciatingly awkward date. He talks about doing volunteer work at his kids’ school, then we see him chaperoning a trip. The vignettes don’t add up to much — they don’t come crashing into one another, as they inevitably did on “Seinfeld.’’ Instead, the bits are random brush strokes in a portrait of C.K.’s life.
C.K. — originally from Newton — comes off as both aggressive, as he pounds his audiences with pessimistic anger, and sweetly self-deprecating. The latter persona emerges mostly in the vignettes, when Louie isn’t wearing his stage armor — he’s the C.K. we saw during his stint on “Parks and Recreation’’ as Leslie Knope’s meek boyfriend. He is the more sympathetic Louie, since he is frequently depressed and humiliated. He botches a date and, in the third episode, he goes to a cruel doctor (played joyously by Ricky Gervais) who laughs at his penis size and jokingly tells him he has AIDS and cancer.
The crude, loud Louie — “The only reason I don’t have sex with animals is because I’m not supposed to and somebody told it to me’’ — is only half the story here.
“Louie’’ is an uneven series — although it’s far more original than C.K.’s HBO effort, “Lucky Louie’’ — and I hope more peripheral characters recur and develop as they have on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.’’ The show has potential in the way it treads some of the same ground as “Men of a Certain Age,’’ as Louie grieves his youth and yet tries to move forward with the second half of his life. As brash as his material can be — a fierce argument between Louie and his friend Nick DiPaolo, for instance, that ends in the hospital — a melancholy mood nonetheless hangs over the show. It gives “Louie’’ a heart.
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