Louie

Louis C.K. was handed a half-hour of American television and no instructions. What he made with it is not a sitcom. Each episode of Louie opens on a stand-up set in a small New York club and then turns into one or two short films about a man called Louie: divorced, a comedian, raising two daughters in a flat that looks like the half of the furniture he was allowed to keep. Jane is played by two different girls across the run, Ursula Parker and Ashley Gerasimovich, and the show does not mind whether you notice. It is original, often careless, and worth your time if you can stand being made uncomfortable on purpose.

The look is plain and meant to be. Louie walks real pavements in grey daylight, and Amy Beth Silver’s production design gives him a flat with more books than chairs and nothing on the walls anyone chose. Gina Sansom’s editing is where the show’s rules are written. Scenes stop when the scene is over rather than when the laugh arrives, and a punchline is as likely to be followed by a long silent shot of a man on a subway platform as by a cut to the next joke.

Pamela Adlon is the second author of the thing. She produces, writes and shares story credit, and she plays Pamela, a single mother Louie wants and who tells him, at length and with some pleasure, why not. Pamela is funnier than Louie and knows it, and every scene they share is a small argument she wins. The daughters, Lilly (Hadley Delany) and Jane, are written as actual children: they ask why, they are bored by the answer, and they are never used as a set-up for him.

The guests are chosen for what they do to the tone. Parker Posey, as Liz, takes Louie on a night across the city and gives the series its best stretch; she is quick and bright and slightly frightening. David Lynch plays Jack Dall, an old television hand, entirely straight. Chris Rock turns up as Chris and plays a version of himself with the volume down. We laughed hard at the sets. More than once we found ourselves not laughing at all, watching Louie alone in the flat after the girls had gone to their mother’s, and the shot went on long enough that we checked how much of the episode was left.

A show made by one man with nobody to answer to has that man’s faults. Louie loses every argument on screen and wins every argument in the writing, because he has written the other side. The series ran to five seasons between 2010 and 2015, and the fourth is where it shows: fourteen episodes, more of them stretched across several weeks, the jokes thinner, subjects that had been watched now being explained. So Did the Fat Lady, in which a woman gives Louie a long speech about how men like him treat women like her, is well acted and carefully shot, and it is also a man writing himself a telling-off he can be seen to accept gracefully. We noticed we were meant to admire him for taking it.

In 2017 Louis C.K. admitted to sexual misconduct, and because the show was built out of his life, the admission changed what the show is. Some critics went back and marked it down hard. We do not think the episodes became worse made. We do think the material about men, sex and being forgiven now reads as a man asking to be excused, and anyone coming to it fresh should know that before the first set begins.

Set beside the half-hour comedies that came before it, it barely looks like the same kind of programme; several that came after were made by people who watched it closely, and they are tidier. Most critics have it a little higher than we do, for the form, which earns it. Watch two or three episodes from the first three seasons, with the sound up and nothing planned afterwards. If you want a comedy to leave on while you cook, this is not it.