Emmy Spotlight: Louie

Louie returned this year after a longer than usual hiatus. When we last left our fictional Louie, Parker Posey had collapsed on the subway and died suddenly, and he flew to China alone for New Year’s Eve. It was a surprisingly melancholy season finale, especially following the “Late Show” three-parter that preceded it. Now in its fourth season, Louie is decidedly more on that melancholy, realist side of things. It’s still very much a comedy, in the sense that it’s designed to draw a laugh, but also in its general approach toward life. What I mean is that it’s a comedy in the Aristotelian sense, as opposed to a tragedy. In other words, what Louie is not, thank goodness, is a sitcom.

This season of Louie is also the show’s best, a more mature, thoughtful, and yes, funny extension of everything that Louis C.K. has been doing for three years now. As the show’s sole writer, director and editor, C.K.’s mastery of the form becomes more and more evident, while Louie progresses and becomes more and more daring. Surreal at times, and very, very real at others, the show navigates these tonal shifts expertly and to great effect; at any given moment an episode can turn on the dime, but the show never panders, is never egregious. It is often beautifully shot, as in the Emmy-nominated “Elevator, Part 6,” and is brilliantly edited, as in “In the Woods, Part 2,” and it is always excellently written. Uniformly, without exception, and that’s not hyperbole.

As you may have guessed from the episode titles I’ve called out already, the season is more heavily serialized than the show has typically been in the past. Of fourteen episodes, eleven are part of multi-episode arcs. But that doesn’t mean you need to watch everything to understand what’s going on—it isn’t like this is 24 or something. The episodes interconnect, but they also stand alone, each acting as its own short story. It’s one of many things that Louie has in common with Girls, but it’s no great revelation to say that Louie is on a whole other level than that (also great) series.

There is such a great depth to this season. By this point it’s a given that Louis C.K. is funny, and talented, and the actors he gathers are equally so. But the storytelling reaches new heights here, with several episodes standing out as series best entries. Take “Elevator, Part Four,” which opens with Janet and Louie in couples’ therapy, a comically surreal scene in which their therapist alternately (and quite meanly) places blame on each of them for the failure of their marriage. C.K. and Susan Kelechi Watson have always had great chemistry, but this season, and especially this episode, delve deeper than ever into their characters’ relationship, and the result is massively rewarding. Louie jokes in the elevator that for the cost of therapy, they could just as easily have their daughter Jane killed. Janet stands there, stone-faced, for a very long moment, until she cracks a laugh just as the scene cuts.

Even better is what C.K. cuts to, an extended flashback in which a much younger Louie and Janet spend the night at a hotel, admit that they want divorce, and have sex for the very last time. After Louie comments that it would be hilarious if Janet had gotten pregnant. We already know she did. The young actors playing Louie and Janet are perfectly cast, despite the fact that the young Janet is somehow white—she makes you forget that almost instantly, and a little cognitive dissonance only adds to the scene, anyway. They fully encapsulate who these people are, not just at this point in their lives, but fundamentally, across their entire lives. With the combination of acting, writing and directing, the audience is never in doubt that these are the same characters we’ve gotten to know in the present day.

This is even truer of “In the Woods,” which features flashbacks to a thirteen-year-old Louie’s first adventures with pot, as in the present, Lily discovers the drug at the same age. I absolutely love how C.K. uses temporality to create such a complete picture of Louie as a character, and how he is so thorough in doing so that he also juxtaposes Louie the father with his own mother, Louie the young man with Janet, and so forth. “In the Woods, Part Two,” is almost entirely a flashback, but when it cuts back to the present, it does so meaningfully. When Louie’s mother yells at him, and keeps on yelling, and breaks down crying, it’s a punch to the gut; when the scene cuts to Louie as a father, with his own child to talk with about pot, that’s something else entirely. F. Murray Abraham also gives a guest turn this episode, as Louie’s absent father, and when Louie talks to Lily later on, you can see, from his acting, and from the way the episode is directed and edited, that Louie is afraid of becoming that absent father himself. He sees the peculiar way that life tends to rhyme with itself, and that idea is simultaneously comforting and terrifying. He remembers the way he so disappointed his science teacher, and his mother, and his best friend. But also he knows that Lily needs his love and support, more even than she needs his discipline.

“In the Woods” is also an extremely serious episode, but it needs to be. It’s not without its laughs, including a pretty amazing turn from Jeremy Renner as Louie’s dealer, but it’s also got these gut-wrenching moments, including Louie’s fight with his mother mentioned above, and his tirade against his father, and the silent treatment his teacher gives him when Louie finally comes clean about his misdeeds. It’s a nightmare of the adult Louie’s, an imagining of every awful thing that could happen to Lily as she grows up, made doubly worse by the fact that those things have happened to Louie already.

The entire season, in retrospect, is a project in slowly piecing together a man that to some degree has been broken by tragedy. He’s unable to understand the women in his life, and so he’s always starving for emotional connection, and it gets worse the older he gets. C.K. makes this more literal than usual throughout Louie’s extended romance with the Hungarian Amia. Their sex scene in “Elevator, Part 5” was a hot topic after it aired, and it is certainly difficult to tell if or when Amia consents. Louie literally drags her into the bed, and the scene is lit and staged in such a way that it happens in almost pitch darkness. That she speaks to him the following morning in Hungarian, speaking literally a different language, underscores not just the lack of communication that leads to dubious consent, but to Louie’s overall inability when it comes to women. The later episodes in the “Elevator” arc lead up to Hurricane Jasmine Forsythe, and feature several bizarre newscasts, with the anchors spouting gibberish. They’re some of the most laugh-out-loud funny bits in the whole season, but I like to think that they’re also speaking to this theme.

That running theme is also why ending the season with “Pamela” is such an inspired decision. As played by Pamela Adlon, the character Pamela is even more Louie-esque than Louie himself. She’s incapable of taking anything season, even and especially her own feelings for Louie, and that brusqueness both makes her perfect for him, and makes talking to him nearly impossible. Louie may not be the best at communicating in a relationship, but he desperately wants to communicate in a relationship, whereas Pamela can think of nothing worse. And yet their courtship at the season’s end is touching, and it culminates, as comedy must, in their own little happy ending. Neither character changes, but by meeting in the middle, they can still find a way to make love, or something, work.

This is an artistic vision that is so singular and so fully realized, quite unlike anything else on television. I can’t use superlatives or hyperbole to compare it to other shows—it’s practically speaking its own language. As I said before, its closest relative is Girls, but even as a fan of that show, Louie blows it out of the water. It’s sometimes as funny as Veep, sometimes as deep and provoking as Mad Men, sometimes even as exhilarating as Breaking Bad, but it is never anything less than its own, special thing. It’s at this point that I’m really glad I was so tough on the previous shows in this spotlight series, because it makes the score I’m about to give that much more emphatic. Louie is a perfect ten. Go watch it.