Lucky Louie (and now Louie)

Started by Ravi, June 09, 2006, 12:42:41 AM

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pete

2nd episode much more like the first season
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

john

Yeah, I was actually just logging in to express my pleasure at last night's episode. Particularly the first half. CK's direction is getting pretty assured and (even though we're only talking about 15 minutes) he's not afraid to take his time establishing a particular mood. The punchline for the first half was pretty terrific.

It really comes down to whatever mood a particular episode is, I guess. Last night's mood was just right.
Maybe every day is Saturday morning.

pete

also it's about how much he beats himself up.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

cronopio 2

what a kick ass episode. this show keeps doing shit no one has done before on television. i'm going through some stuff about moving, so it really felt good to see a story like that.

picolas

i died at the end of the accountant scene.

JG


diggler

That Tom Sawyer bit at the end killed me. "He's carrying a dead cat, this is not a good sign..."
I'm not racist, I'm just slutty

Reel

How Louis C.K. Is Reinventing The Sitcom By Being More Like Donald Duck


If Louie were any other half-hour comedy, tonight's episode would be an important one, following as it does our hero's heartfelt confession of love for acerbic single-mom pal Pamela and her easily-missed and oh-so-fleeting offer to do something about it last week. That would make tonight the night when we really got to see Louie's sadsackery in full bloom after making himself vulnerable and blowing his chance.

That's if Louie were any other half-hour comedy. But it's not. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one seems to be at the kernel of all the rest: Unless I've been mistaken, Louie is utterly indifferent to continuity.

To be honest, I've never assumed that anything that happens in one vignette has an impact on anything that happens in another. Characters flit in and out, sometimes to return at a later date, sometimes not. (So far, at least.) In any other show that has separately introduced the main character's brother and sister, we'd figure that we're getting a fuller picture of his family. On Louie, the only thing I can be sure of is that Louis C. K. figured that one story he wanted to tell needed a brother and one called for a sister. It's entirely possible that the two don't even occupy the same narrative.

C. K. is, in many ways, the preeminent short-story writer currently working in the television medium. As such, I don't ever expect all the episodes to be interconnected in the manner of a normal sitcom. So much so, in fact, that I had to go to IMDb.com to figure out if the same (great, GREAT) girls play his daughters every time, since I wouldn't put it past C. K. to cast them with whoever was available in any given week.

(Having said that, I'm delighted that he's stuck with the same kids, because Hadley Delany and Ursula Parker are awesomely childish and funny in a way that's quickly made these two specific actresses indispensable. And Parker's IMDb bio reads, in full, "She is a prodigious violinist." Not "avid." Not "classically trained." Not "talented." "Prodigious." What's not to love?)

Like Donald Duck, the character of Louie exists outside of continuity. When the story required that Donald Duck be a cowboy, he was a cowboy. If he needed to be an Arctic explorer, he'd be an Arctic explorer. The character was the same, and the relationships – with Scrooge, with Daisy, with Huey, Dewey and (funnily enough) Louie – were often still the same, if placed into different contexts. But the stories were self-contained, like sketches. There was no continuity as such.

At its best, that's the spirit that infuses Louie. C. K. is free to follow whatever train of thought that catches his fancy to its logical conclusion without concern for how he'll deal with it in the next episode. He can simply wipe the slate clean and start over with the same core elements: standup comedian, divorced father of two little girls, New Yorker.

After last week's episode, there were plenty of online comments expressing relief that Louie and Pamela didn't become an item, as that would ruin what makes their relationship (a finely tuned symphony of unrequited affection and absolutely requited bad attitude) so much fun to watch. But that, I believe, misses the point: Even if they had slept together – even if they had fallen madly in love and gotten married and grown old together – who's to say that it would have had an iota of impact on future episodes? Maybe it will, maybe it won't. For most shows, that would be a massive, buzzkilling narrative inconsistency. On Louie, it's freedom.

by Marc Hirsch, Npr.com

ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ

A silly title that establishes nothing.  This is not reinventing the sitcom.  As far as I can tell, sitcoms make up fake characters all the time as vehicles to plots that exist solely in one episode.

Louie is great, but this article is not.  I don't see the connection between Louie and Donald Duck more than Louie and virtually any other serialized character in a world where new characters are added for the sake of one episode and possibly brought back if a situation harkens back a popular figure.  In fact, it doesn't get more traditional than that. 
"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

picolas

louie isn't serialized, it's episodic. that's the point. there has been a push towards serialization in sitcoms. i'm having a tough time thinking of any sitcom that has the same kind of history/continuity as louie. childrens hospital comes close, but each episode is still one story, whereas even the structure of louie is totally unpredictable from week to week. one episode might be about one thing, or twenty minutes of one thing and five minutes of something else which might be completely unrelated. the article makes a solid point.

ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ

How is it not serialized?  Sometimes it picks up on its own split ends, sometimes it leaves them for later. I'll give it the fact that its structure and approach to comedy so dark it's almost drama, I love the show, but the comparison to Donald Duck is an attempt at looking hip, it is an unfounded and arbitrary comparison.  It's just a looser, almost sketch comedy approach to a situational comedy, but I don't see it reinventing the genre. 

My homework at this point is to rewatch Season 1 and catch back up on Season 2, homework I do not dread at all, and perhaps I'm wrong.  But it didn't strike me as wildly innovative, just incredibly well written, shot and acted.
"As a matter of fact I only work with the feeling of something magical, something seemingly significant. And to keep it magical I don't want to know the story involved, I just want the hypnotic effect of it somehow seeming significant without knowing why." - Len Lye

pete

its tone varies wildly from skit to skit - sometimes people spoke gibberish, sometimes a character flies off in a helicopter, other times the stories are painfully lifelike, I think that's what people meant by a lack of continuity. he also used different girls to play his daughter and he lived in different apartments.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

picolas

yeah. i think you're being kind of paranoid about why that article was written. from your description alone, "so dark it's almost drama" it's a pretty innovative show, often subverting the most basic ideas of what a sitcom should be, eg. a platform for funny things with at least one funny thing happening every few moments. how many sitcoms have the guts to (intentionally) not be funny for ten minutes? the article justifies the comparison a bunch of times.

squints

Episode 9, season 2 is just absolutely incredible. Doug Stanhope is fantastic (didn't think i would ever say that). The whole thing felt like a Raymond Carver short story. Gripping TV with a lot of cum and fart jokes.
"The myth by no means finds its adequate objectification in the spoken word. The structure of the scenes and the visible imagery reveal a deeper wisdom than the poet himself is able to put into words and concepts" – Friedrich Nietzsche

pete

"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton