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Film/TV TV Features

TV Review: Louie

“TV was (and to a lesser extent still is) fractal, with each individual episode standing in for the show as a totality. To tinker with the basic concept — like letting two battling lovers marry and have a child in the fourth season — is to destroy the delicate balance that keeps viewers tuning in.” — Ty Burr, Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame

“I said, ‘I won’t show you anything. You have to just wait until I’m finished with the shows.’ That was a very reckless thing to do, and [FX] could have said no, but if they had I would have just gone back to the road. But they said yes, so here I am.” — Louis C.K., interview with FilmSchoolRejects.com, June 28, 2010

FX’s Louie, which wraps its fourth season Monday night, stubbornly reinvents television every week. Like his creator, writer-director-editor-star Louis C.K., the Louie in Louie is a comedian and father of two girls. He’s eloquent onstage, but that telltale hand on the wall of the Comedy Cellar hints at other insecurities. At times, his failure to communicate grows so profound that he forsakes Newhart- or drops the Letterman-style stammering and falls mute. He spends a chunk of every episode sitting or standing silently and awaiting judgment; half of this season has explored Louie’s relationship with a Hungarian woman (Eszter Balint) who barely speaks English.

The hilarious Louis C.K.

Louie is a sad sack who trudges about his day like your uncle Marv. No belt can rescue his droopy jeans; no Beefy-T or XXL-sweater can hide his gut. He half-shuffles, half-lumbers into his scenes like a drunk or a grizzly bear that just got off the Tilt-A-Whirl. His gait is as expressive as Chaplin’s waddle, Tati’s tiptoe, or Keaton’s pit-bull charge.

In Louie‘s universe, things get weird fast. A tickle fight with an astronaut’s beautiful daughter winds up in the emergency room. A hurricane named after a Southern debutante kills LeBron James and demolishes Brooklyn in seconds. In flashbacks (or are they daydreams?) Louie’s black ex-wife suddenly turns white. His recalcitrant daughter suddenly cries out, “Why is there even an America?” A fat girl suddenly says “fuck” on network TV.

But things frequently slow to a crawl, too; the sense of time passing both quickly and slowly is reminiscent of those moments after an automobile accident. C.K.’s proclivity for long takes and shallow lenses prolong awkward moments, difficult conversations, and solipsistic reveries that explode in his face. In “So Did the Fat Lady” — one of the most extraordinary reckonings with female body-image issues I’ve ever seen — an awesome, overweight woman (Sarah Baker) takes Louie to task for his refusal to really see her. The camera circles them repeatedly but it won’t look away from her or from him when Louie tries to escape. That episode is the strongest example of Louie‘s bracingly surreal approach to storytelling, where the terrifying unpredictability of the next thing seen or the next thing said is the only constant.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Louie
FX
Season 4 Finale, Monday, June 16th, 9 p.m.

Categories
Film/TV TV Features

Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, and Edward Hopper

Spoiler alert: If you aren’t current on Mad Men, be aware of thematic and plot revelations in this review. And, if you don’t know what Mad Men is, Google it and get busy catching up. Also: Consider where you may have gone wrong in your life.

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, Netflix, and Hulu. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring. Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death.

Mad Men is an Edward Hopper. It’s Nighthawks and Chop Suey and Office in a Small City and Intermission and a dozen more, all rolled into one: gorgeous, perfectly designed, lonely, contemplative, sexy, and gender-inclusive. Creator Matthew Weiner paints Mad Men with pure confident brilliance. Mad Men is social commentary with the benefit of decades of perspective.

The big knock commonly advanced about Mad Men is that nothing much ever happens in the show. The times that the show has truly shocked viewers can probably be counted on one hand: A lawnmower comes to mind, as does a man’s severed nipple. But, taking place during the tumultuous history of the 1960s, Mad Men usually prefers to let the big moments happen in the public consciousness and take the personal histories at a more glacial pace. Pacing is actually Mad Men at its most honest: The world may change overnight, but people don’t.

Weiner ramped up for Mad Men as a writer on The Sopranos. His episodes, including “Chasing It,” “Soprano Home Movies,” and “Luxury Lounge,” are more sociological, observational, and digressive than most other Sopranos episodes. Weiner never seemed as interested in the big plot points of the New Jersey crime family as he was with what effect this was having on individuals. In Mad Men, he doesn’t recreate the scenes of those seismic national events but instead focuses on what they mean for the characters — similar to how author James Ellroy explores “the private nightmare of public policy” in his Underworld USA trilogy.

Last Sunday, Mad Men‘s Season 7 signed off until 2015 with “Waterloo,” a half-season finale in the middle of a bifurcated final round of episodes. (Don’t get me started about how annoying a network ploy this is.) But, at this point, I’m ready to stop debating if Mad Men is the best show of all time: It almost doesn’t matter what happens in the show’s final seven episodes, Mad Men has surpassed other great hour-long shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, M*A*S*H, Breaking Bad, and whatever else is presumptively the title-holder. (And comparing the relative value of dramas versus comedies is too difficult and too dependent on preferences. Apples to apples, I’ll take Parks and Recreation over any other comedy and Mad Men over any other drama.)

Until late in Season 7, Mad Men hadn’t yet tipped its hand about ultimate intentions: Is it a show about things falling apart or coming together? As “Waterloo” ends, things are hopeful. Don finally has the inclination and means to simply do and enjoy his work. Sally picked the earnest nerd over the cynical football player. Peggy found her voice. Things may change again in the second half of the season. Mad Men might do its thematic version of the Altamont Free Concert. Either way, it’s a cultural alchemy that is a joy to behold.

Watching Mad Men isn’t like watching paint dry, it’s like watching a great painting dry: Hopper’s Morning Sun oxidizing into immortality.