"Louie" Year Two

Yes, yes, I know that "Louie" just finished its third season, but this is not the kind of show that has a lot of continuity or a lot of particularly zeitgeisty moments, so I've been happy to just wait for the episodes to show up on Netflix and watch them at my own speed. However, considering the amount of hype over "Louie" really exploded during its second year, I was curious to get a look at these episodes and see what everyone was talking about.

Louis C.K is now forty-three, and his daughters Lily and Jane are nine and five. We see more of the kids this year, and accordingly the girls are now played by regular actresses, Hadley Delany and Ursula Parker. Pamela Adlon also has a bigger role, deliberately set up to be Louie's recurring love interest in an honest-to-goodness story arc. Otherwise, Louie's day-to-day life is pretty much the same. There's some acknowledgement that he's more famous now, and appears on television, but his luck with women is no better, parenting is still a struggle, and life is full of disappointments, supplying him with plenty of material for his foul-mouthed, painfully honest stand-up routines. I wonder if the production values have gotten better or if I'm just used to the style of the show now, but the second season didn't seem nearly as rough-hewn as the first. The editing is less jarring and the cinematography feels far more assured and deliberate.

I didn't think there was any kind of quantum leap in quality as for as the writing. You can definitely see it getting more ambitious though. There were fewer vignettes and more stories that took up the entire length of an episode, including the show's first hour-long episode "Duckling," where Louie goes to Afghanistan to entertain the troops. But as the stories got more focused and concept-driven, they also lost some of the free-form, rambling nature that I really enjoyed. I didn't see too many really surreal, out-of-left-field segments, with the exception of Louie witnessing the best and worst of humanity simultaneously in a subway station, and a bizarre nighttime odyssey through New Jersey. You can sense the show getting more serialized as it goes on, with episodes like "Niece," where Louie has to take care of sullen, thirteen-year-old Amy, in what feels like the beginning of a major storyline, though the kid disappears in the next episode.

Not that more serialization is a bad thing. We know Louie and his shtick pretty well now, and it's good to see the world around him start to cohere a little more. Pamela becomes a real, solid personality. The girls, though still very amorphous, are more familiar and distinct from each other. The stories feel more personal, and you can sense Louis C.K. digging a little deeper for material. I really liked the way he handled the guest spots, which reflect a realistic relationship with the showbiz world. An entire episode is devoted to Joan Rivers, who Louie solicits career advice from and holds up as an example of a great career comic. The New Jersey story ends with Louie calling up a henpecked Chris Rock at two in the morning for a ride home, who delivers the kind of disgusted lecture on responsibility that only a very old friend could. Finally there's the Dane Cook encounter, where he and Louie air their grievances about each other to each other, incorporating real-life tensions.

The highlight of the season would have to be "Duckling" though, for the sheer audacity of spending an hour with Louie in an active war zone millions of miles away from the show's usual Manhattan haunts. I found the set-ups with the stowaway duckling and the Afghan natives to be awfully contrived, but Louie's fumbling attempts to make nice with the Christian cheerleader and the performance scenes made a good counterbalance. This was a big episode that never got too self-important or let itself become a Very Special Episode, but it was still quietly profound in an unassuming way, and I thought the happy ending was earned. I hope "Louie" finds more reasons to venture out of New York in the future.

So did the second year of "Louie" match up to the hype? Mostly. It was bigger and more daring than the first year, but the initial shock of the no-budget aesthetics and the canny crudeness has faded away. The writing is still consistently strong, but it's easier to see some of the seams now, and familiarity is slowly but surely creeping in. Its highs were higher, but there were some lows too. "Louie" remains a unique show on television that reflects the intensely personal voice of a single creator, with the kind of creative freedom that others can only dream of. At its worst, it still beats out 90% of the comedy on television today.
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