Louie

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The finale was extremely vulnerable and compelling. Pamela is being pitched as The One for now, but I don't see it working out for long. Louie, in his television guise, is one of the neediest characters on television and will just keep asking more and more of someone incapable of giving it.

I think I laughed maybe a dozen times this season, which is disappointing, but the show remains a fertile ground for creativity and social commentary.

I will say that I preferred season 3, which I would consider one of my favorite seasons of television on the strength of the Parker Posey and David Letterman arcs alone. But I gotta say, I'm still pretty irritated that the Vanessa character got dropped. I understand that her monologue wouldn't resonate as well if we had seen her again, but that was a waste of a great character and it soured me on season 4 to some degree.
 
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I'll take Pamela, Elevator, and Into The Woods over the talk show multi-parter from last season.

And I've ceased caring how much I laugh during the show. Its refusal to stay categorized as a comedy (regardless of what its commonly accepted label is) is really refreshing. If a show is surprising me, moving me, showing me a new perspective on something, it doesn't need to be frequently funny.

Not sure where else they could have gone with Vanessa. If anything, they could have builded her up over a couple episodes before that speech. But afterwards? Where do you go? She's just a nice person with a good sense of humor. Pamela as written (and performed) comes off a lot more interesting and complicated, and that was clear after just her first appearance.

The final 2 Pamela episodes occasionally came close to cliche rom-com territory, but her dark humor and own insecurities always pulled it back from the brink. And it's a bit of a Graduate ending. Louie gets the girl, but not really on his own terms, and concludes with a now what?/wait-and-see note.

Personally I think this would be a great place to end the whole series. But then again, since he's established that he can break continuity and do whatever tickles his fancy, there are certainly other places he can go with it. It just seemed like this season got pretty autobiographical/personal (however veiled) near the end and to go all absurdist and random again would be an odd gear-shift.
 
I do care about the lack of humor, as Louis CK is one of the funniest men alive and I feel that aspect of his skill set is being underutilized. But I do applaud his range and ambition and obviously I still love the show on its own merits. I just prefer a comedy/drama mixture.

As much as I like Pamela, I don't feel I've learned much about her character that I didn't already extrapolate from season 1. I understand that this season is more concept/problem driven than character driven, but I don't know. Something about that choice seemed too easy to me. It did feel rom-commy to me, in a "fate bringing two broken hearts together" kind of way, which has been done to death. Again, that's not to say I dislike the Pamela character in general, I just feel it was an uncharacteristically conservative choice to bring her back.

Granted, if they do choose not to return for a fifth season, the Pamela arc would work as a full-circle finale. Louie's ass seals the deal.
 
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I'm actually a little disappointed in this season of Louie on the whole as well, because it's... well, not very funny. It's had its moments, but the key feature of his creativity on this show for me has been his ability to weave a really harmonious interplay of almost absurd comedy with surprising veins of pathos and thematic exploration. He's also probably the forerunner of formal innovation on television right now, and I have to admit this season has probably been the peak of that so far. Truly staggering what he's doing outside of the common formulas. However I do feel it's become a little askew in terms of how densely focused and balanced his episodes and greater arcs have been in seasons 2 and 3 especially. Really, I'm at the point generally speaking where I derive much more satisfaction from artists doing amazing things within the extreme boundaries of classically accepted forms and conventions than in exploding them completely and bordering on the avante-garde or truly experimental. And really, Into the Woods is probably my least favorite episode of the show's entire run, though I'd agree with Laz this season has still had especially high points which eclipse some of the stuff last season. Elevator had some amazing moments, and I really loved the Pamala finale, as you'd suspect given what I've already said here. But Into the Woods has a framing device which was completely inert to me, and what you're left with is something I feel I've seen over a dozen times before and better. Really just left me jonesing to watch Dazed and Confused or Freaks and Geeks again.
 
I don't think that last comment is fair. I haven't seen a version of this story where the faculty and parents are written so fully and multi-layered. We get to see Louie's mother, teacher, and principal from various angles that I do believe said something fresh, if not wholly unique, about how adults deal with problem kids.
 
I'm with Laz on this. I think this was my favorite season -- it was more drama than comedy, but I've grown to care so much about Louie and his astonishing daughters that I'm grnuinely interested in what happens to them.

And there's still marvelous, earned comedy. Memphis and I nearly died when he pressed the button in the art museum, and then again, in a lighter, almost cheap but still sweet fat joke about water displacement. I found Pamela's continued cruelty a little bit unexplained, but that's about my only real complaint.

It's remarkable that perhaps the funniest show on TV is also the most emotionally complex -- so many feels during Into The Woods.


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Best comedy on television. And it wasn't funny at all this year. Louie continues to grow on an artistic level even if the show itself has become less funny with each successive season.

A similar comparison would be The Ricky Gervais Show where they started with their strongest material from those podcasts and the funny got worse with Season 2 and 3 while the animators made up a lot of the gap by expanding on their craft greatly each year.

At this point though, I'm not sure if Louie really is the same show as it was in its first season. But it's still brilliant.
 
Louie - Season 5

Anyone here still watching this? I mean, that's a rhetorical question, someone must be, but discussion has been nonexistent for this season so far.

It's a "return to form" with regards to pacing and aesthetic, this is certainly closer to what most people expected from Louie a few seasons ago, but I'm not sure the episode quality has been terribly high so far.

The opener was average, had a few laughs, moved on. Second episode was way too fragmented for my taste but was very, very funny. Funniest episode since the trilogy at the end of season 3. Third episode felt a bit like Eddie from season 2, but was more startling and actively unlikable. The opening was obnoxious and felt very self-aware without any real catharsis. I actually liked the episode, but I won't be returning to it often.

So far I'd say this season is about B level. Not bad, not great. Funnier than last season but the storytelling is lagging behind a bit.
 
this totally snuck up on me -- i had no idea it was on.

first episode was fine, second episode was great. Pamela elevates everything. i could watch her torture him all day and all night.

need to catch up on the third episode.
 
I had no frickin' idea Pamela is the voice of Bobby Hill. Now I want to go back and watch all the episodes she appears in.

I laughed really hard at last week's episode, both at the poop joke intro and when the unfunny comic showed up on TV at the end.

So far, I'm into the return of the "funny" stuff. I still enjoyed the more esoteric stuff, but I like to laugh.
 
I was howling at the poop opening. The daughters screaming "Daddy no!!!" was gold.

The, uhh, climax of episode 3 was also hilarious (perfect water sound effect) and the scene at the hospital when the older lesbian said
"You came on my unborn son's face!"
is some kind of depraved genius.
 
That was episode one, and I was dying at that part.

The poop opening is all I've seen from episode two and dumb as it was I was cracking up.

Episode three just irritated me straight through. Didn't enjoy that one.
 
On a more serious note, I loved Pamela's near-monologue over dinner, explaining why moving in together would be a bad idea. It's a cynical viewpoint, but she makes her case convincingly, and Louis doesn't even give his character a counter-argument.
 
Louie hasn't been very argumentative lately. He let that millennial asshole shop owner walk all over him, ignored "little white bitch" guy (LMAO at that line) and let Pamela have her way.

When he finally goes off on Lenny in episode 3, I feel as if it's a culmination of several episode of acquiescing. That's great writing.
 
And just watched ep 4. Is this the darkest season ever? I thought it was also brilliant. He constructs such complicated situations and then subverts our expectations of how they should play out.

It's interesting -- I've been all gay over Amy Schumer lately. Her show on CC is great; it's funny, deeply feminist, and also deeply critical of female culture. She's the celebrated comedienne of the moment; but the intellectual distance between her show and its social critique and what Louie has done for 4 seasons now is fairly profound. He is an artist at work -- I feel like I'm reading someone's short stories.
 
Anyone still watching?

I think it's still great. Like, "best show on TV" great.

It also makes me want to have kids. His daughters, and the actresses who play them, and his utterly believable interactions with them, are so credible and authentic.
 
Yes, I'm definitely on board.

The last two Pamela episodes have been pretty bold stuff, this time played more for comic effect. But it actually shows a Louie who's more adventurous and comfortable with his sexuality.
 
Wow, kind of a fucked up, unexpected ending there with the hack comedian dying. But this two part "Road Trip" ending was really tremendous. People have talked and joked about the horror of airplanes, airports, and motels forever but this stuff really rang true for me. Everybody hates all that shit, but it feels like he's doing something fresh and something closer to truth. He's able to highlight the absurdity of real, everyday life in a way that feels so oddly beautiful and, of course, so fucking funny.

Great season. Too bad it was only 8 episodes.
 
Man, I didn't even realize that was the finale. Crazy. Anyway, great end to the season. The ending took me by surprise, even with Louie being the morbid show it is.

The one concern I have with that episode being a season finale is the possibility of the episode's impact being lost over the break between season 5 and 6. Louie's character really seemed to have a breakthrough and the playful ending with Jane bore that out for me. I hope it doesn't turn out to be entirely inconsequential.
 
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I loved the Civil War photo thing; what a bizarre detour that was done so beautifully and exists as just this strange little vignette, recalled nicely at the end in a dismissal of all the dark shit that came inbetween.
 
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