'Louie': Would It Kill You to Laugh?
It’s a new season of Louie, and thus another batch of half-hours spent inside the id, ego, and superego of Louis C.K., star-writer-director-cinematographer-chief-bottle-washer of FX’s sitcom — excuse me, ongoing vanity art project.
Not that C.K. is vain — far from it. In fact, sometimes too far from it. There are times when Louie presents Louie so bluntly, so loutishly, I wish C.K. would say to himself, “Ehhhh, maybe I don’t need to go there.” (New-season spoiler: poopy pants. I will say no more.)
Season 5 begins with what seems like an auto-critique of Season 4, a batch of episodes you may recall as offering sometimes intentionally laugh-free, Louie-ized takes on our non-hero’s childhood, violence against women, and fat-shaming. Thursday’s premiere finds Louie discussing his current state of mind — gloomy to the point of despair — with a therapist who, let’s just say, does not inspire confidence.
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The premiere features a fine guest turn by Judy Gold, whose used to have an admirable stand-up before she started concentrating on producing and writing. Gold is willing to play an exceedingly unsympathetic character — half of a couple employing a birth surrogate — and she fits right into the mood of Louie, its harsh landscape of soulful realism and perennial disappointment.
Laughs? I think we’ve reached the point in Louie where such releases of merriment are either irrelevant or well-nigh accidental. C.K. doesn’t even seem to be placing much value on eliciting guffaws during the stand-up segments that used to give his show a jolly lift at the beginning and end of each half-hour. Interestingly, over the course of the first four episodes I’ve seen, the warmest vibes emanate from Pamela, last season a source of such mixed feelings, she was compelled to utter the immortal Louie imprecation, “You can’t even rape well.” As performed with amazingly shaded subtlety by Pamela Adlon, Pam has become Louie’s most amiable and honest sidekick-with-benefits. She’s the character who provides us with a much-needed point of view from which to gaze at Louie — without her, he might seem a whiny lump; with her, however, he’s intelligent clay to be molded into a better human being. And the most accurate gauge of, as she puts it, his “boneability.”
I know it’s just the start of a new season, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all (given the way C.K. has proved that he’ll follow his interests and notions wherever they may lead him) if next season of Louie is retitled Pamela.
Louie airs Thursdays at 10:30 p.m. on FX.
