The first episode of Lucky Louie (HBO, Sundays, 10:30 p.m.) opens like any other traditional family sitcom of the last 20 years: Put-upon blue collar dad Louie (Louis C.K.) sits at his kitchen table with daughter Lucy (Kelly Gould), who peppers him with a barrage of typical little-kid questions, almost all of which are, "Why?" It's the kind of thing you could have seen on Everybody Loves Raymond or The Cosby Show, and it conveys an immediate familiarity and comfort. Ah, you think, I know where this is going.
But you don't, and that's what makes Louie (or at least its first episode) so refreshing. The questioning drives Louie to make dire statements of existential despair, the only way that Lucy is finally satisfied and stops pestering him. Cue wacky opening credits!
The rest of the show is even more of a jarring combination of dedicated traditionalism and HBO's trademark envelope-pushing. "Lucky Louie is taped before a live studio audience," says one of the stars after the credits of each episode roll, a phrase that probably hasn't been heard in a sitcom voice-over in decades. It's easy to tell right away that the show is shot in front a live audience: Unlike the canned laughter on most traditional network sitcoms, the laughs on Louie are raw and unprocessed; at one point, I swear I heard an audience member exclaim "Shit!" in response to a particularly out-there joke. It sounds more like the response to Saturday Night Live than to Raymond or Friends.
NBA Finals Viewing Tip |
The argument about whether the Dallas Mavericks should have traded Dirk Nowitzki for Shaq is about to end once and for all, so my advice is: Watch the little guys. Yes, Nowitzki should score at will, and Shaq's going to singlehandedly put two Mavericks in foul trouble each game, but the key will be whether the Heat can handle the speed of Jason Terry and Devin Harris. Somebody better give Gary Payton a rocket pack. Play begins at 6 p.m. Thursday on ABC.
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That makes sense given C.K.'s background as a writer for SNL as well as Chris Rock's, David Letterman's and Conan O'Brien's talk shows. He infuses that risky, only-stoners-are-awake-to-watch-this sensibility into a structure that is deliberately as classic and traditional as possible. In addition to mechanic Louie and cute daughter Lucy, the cast includes Louie's oft-exasperated wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon), the neighbors across the hall and an assortment of Louie's blue-collar buddies. The action takes place in time-honored sitcom locations: the kitchen, the break room at work, the hallway outside Louie's apartment. Although HBO has no commercials, every few minutes the show fades to black at the point where commercials might air. Unlike most of HBO's original dramas and even comedies, Louie doesn't play like a mini-movie; it's designed specifically to play in the very familiar sitcom format.
Which, perhaps, is why at first it seems so utterly brilliant. The first time Louie and his friends swear up a storm, or Louie and Kim discuss their sex life in very graphic detail (or, better yet, have an on-camera sex scene in which C.K. is very obviously actually naked—the audience loves that), you start to think that maybe all that was needed to save the traditional sitcom was more foul language and explicit sex. Because this is at least 10 times as funny as any traditional multi-camera, laugh-tracked sitcom that's premiered in the last five years.
Once the novelty and shock of the vulgarity wears off, though, what's left is, strangely enough, fairly predictable. Louie and Kim have your average sitcom-couple problems, and Kim's brother Jerry (Rick Shapiro) is right out of the stock "wacky neighbor" casting pool that goes back to the earliest days of TV. After the pilot, which was written by C.K., subsequent episodes aren't quite as funny. But even if the show settles into chuckles from belly laughs, it still proves that all you really need are good jokes and likable characters—nothing revolutionary—to reinvigorate the traditional sitcom format.