In case you don't feel rotten enough that "you're not rising to the occasion," maybe FX's "Louie" will do the trick

The promo for last week's episode of Louie, "Moving." (Pamela Adlon, who played Louie's wife on the HBO series Lucky Louie, is a consulting producer of Louie and appears occasionally as Louie's friend Pamela.) Episode 4 of Season 2 airs on FX tonight at 10:30.

"I have children. I have two kids, and I'm totally not saving for them at all. It's really bad, how I'm not preparing for their future, or even their near present. it's so irresponsible and unfair.

"I know it's wrong, but part of me feels like, why should they get the money anyway? They didn't do the shows, why should they get the money? Whey should they get paid for shit I did? It doesn't really make sense to me. It doesn't make sense that your kids get your money after you're gone.

"It's like when we used to let kings take over for their fathers. That's the craziest rule that ever existed, that if the king dies, they let his kid be the king! What are the odds that he's not gonna be a piece of shit? How do you let -- ?"

-- from a standup routine in last week's "Moving" episode of Louie

by Ken

This is embarrassing. Not so much that I managed to miss the entire 13-episode first season of Louis C.K.'s FX comedy series Louie, but that I finally found out about it via a report on the second-season launch by goofy Nancy Franklin, in the June 13 New Yorker. Worse still, now that I've seen a couple of first-season episodes as well as the first three second-season ones, I have to say that goofy Nancy's piece seems to me genuinely perceptive.

Only an abstract is available free online, but it's not a bad synopsis:

Creating the half-hour FX comedy "Louie," which débuted last summer and begins its second season on June 23rd, was an act that called for some bravery on the part of the comedian Louis C.K.: he put out a show that, in some ways, clearly imitated "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and "Seinfeld" -- or, at least, was likely to be compared to them -- and had a title that reminded viewers of the memorably unsatisfying HBO sitcom he worked on five years ago, "Lucky Louie," which was cancelled after one season. If that wrong turn led C.K. to "Louie," it was worth it. He is solely responsible for this show -- he's the creator, the writer, the director, the editor, the star, and one of the executive producers. He plays himself, as Larry David does in "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and his job as a standup comedian is part of the show, as was Jerry Seinfeld's in "Seinfeld." In life, as in the show, C.K. is now divorced, and shares custody of his two young children. C.K. seems destined to be alone, and seemed that way even when he was still married. When he talks about relationships, he always looks ahead to their dire conclusions. His New York is not Fun City; it's a place where you're constantly reminded that you're not rising to the occasion. If you've seen any of C.K.'s work, you know that inappropriateness is only the beginning. It's not just that he, as the trope goes, says the things that everyone else only thinks; he says the things that people won't admit to thinking. The show is a kind of tribute to truth. (And to dirtiness.) This isn't a single-dad comedy, though; more compellingly, it's a comedy about the death spiral that is life, and about giving reality its due.

(Nancy explains, by the way, that "C.K." is "the user-friendly homonym, adopted years ago, of his actual last name, Szekely.")

Maybe one reason I took Nancy's piece under advisement was that I hadn't much liked the HBO Lucky Louie, although unlike Nancy, I didn't have any previous experience of Louie himself, but the show, despite its occasional funny moments, was so forced and, I don't know, creepy that I found it hard to watch.

Seeing Louie's own rendition of himself in the FX Louie, I understand better what his HBO creative team was trying to channel. There's nothing especially appealing about Louie, nothing much to admire or even much care about, except that relentless streak of cutting through to truths that often aren't pleasant.

Nancy cites an apt example:

It's not just that [Louie], as the trope goes, says the things that everyone else only thinks; he says the things that people won't admit to thinking. In a scene where he's brushing his daughter's teeth before bed, she tells him, in a sweet, innocent voice, that she prefers to stay with her mother: "I like Mama's better because she makes good food, and I love her more." Louie doesn't react while she's in the room, but as she walks away with her back to him he flips her the finger. He is a good father, though, and no less so for giving voice to the all-wrong thoughts that occasionally pass through his head. Doing standup at the end of that episode, he tells the audience, "I love that kid to pieces. But I wish she was never born." He isn't worried about whether the audience likes him; he's interested in the truth, which, in this case, is that rearing children is hard.

Clearly this theme, that rearing children is hard, looms large with Louie. The following clip is from the final episode of Season 1, which I watched again online last night and only wish you could see with the standup scene into which it segues, in which Louie talks about the difficulty of getting the kids to sleep, so necessary for life and health, instead of which they engage in amazing flights of creativity which he just doesn't want to hear.



Last week's episode, "Moving," I have to say, blew me away. It's an episode in which Louie is made so conscious, as Nancy puts it, that he's "not rising to the occasion," that he's jolted into his own Twilight Zone, set in the surreal world of New York real estate.

I know there are places besides New York where the real estate market is brutal, so I hope that at least some non-New Yorkers can appreciate the extent to which our market seems almost purposely designed to smack us down with the awful knowledge that we're "not rising to the occasion," a realization that overwhelms Louie when he decides, all this time after his divorce, that it's time to find a better place to live for him and his daughters when they're with him.

The first part of the episode, as represented by the promo clip up top, is an extremely nicely done "chamber of horrors"-type account of the essential impossibility of upgrading your real estate situation without having made a significant upward financial leap. But then, in seemingly innocent steps, Louie stumbles into his leap from reality.

Walking dejectedly around his home turf, Greenwich Village, he passes a quite nice-looking townhouse with a decorous for-sale sign, and on the spur of the moment whips out his cell phone and dials the contact number on the sign. The next thing we know, he's being led through the house by a real estate agent played with charm and grace by Donna Hanover. And at a certain point the standard agent's spiel about a house that's obviously in another world from the dumps Louie has been looking at, the "reality" is distorted into, presumably, the way Louie is perceiving the real estate agent's spiel, which goes something like this:

This would be the ideal home for single father and his children. Your girls would b e very, very happy here, even happier than they are at their mother's house. You would be their favorite, and no one could judge you, or say that you were anything but a wonderful, wonderful father. Buying this house would fix absolutely everything. Everything. [As she keeps repeating "everything," they both begin twirling around, then dancing together, until LOUIE begins intoning, "Yes it would, yes it would."]
LOUIE: How much is the house?
REAL ESTATE AGENT: The asking price is 17 million.
LOUIE [gulps, then -- ]: I'll take it.

Then we see Louie arriving in the office of a bespectacled young gentleman (Peter Benson, I think -- credits for Louie aren't easily come by) who we soon enough figure out is his accountant. Louie mentions that he's got some theater gigs coming up, "some good money rolling in," and the accountant asks what he wants to buy, pointing out that that's pretty much the only reason Louie ever comes to the office. He's pleased to hear that Louie is planning to move -- ready to move on with this life. When he finds out that Louie has already found a place, he has to move heaven and earth to extract the price from him: "Seven . . . teen . . . million."

The most tactful thing the accountant can think to say is, "Do I really have to explain to you why you can't buy a $17 million house?" Apparently he does. He breaks it down: Louie would need a $3.4 deposit, "in cash," then face monthly payments of around $80,000. Louie asks how much he has in savings, and the accountant tells him $7000. Louie does seem to see that this presents a problem, and finally asks how much he can afford to spend on a house, and the accountant ponders his answer briefly before saying, "Seven thousand dollars."

In the next scene we see Louie back at the house with Gloria the real estate agent, who grasps without his having to spell it out that there is a certain financial shortfall. She offers to show him some apartment rentals. He thanks her but informs her that he's going to buy this house.

In the brief post-commercial final scene we see Louie and his daughters . . . well, I know what we saw, but I want to see tonight's episode before I credit it.

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