'Louie' Premiere Episodes

Louie is an effective showcase for the bleak, caustic comedy of Louis C.K., who serves as producer, writer, director and star. The mix of narrative vignettes and stand-up performance is sometimes disjointed, but almost always funny.

I think I might be the only critic who liked Louis C.K.’s 2006 HBO deconstructionist sitcom Lucky Louie, but even I will admit that he’s probably better suited to this more straightforward adaptation of his stand-up comedy. The ambition of Lucky Louie was admirable, but it was perhaps trying a little too hard to be innovative; Louie, on the other hand, finds C.K. just doing what he does best, completely unfiltered, and it ends up more satisfying to watch.

Like early episodes of Seinfeld, Louie mixes snippets of C.K. performing stand-up with narrative segments in which he essentially plays himself, a middle-aged, divorced father of two daughters. Unlike Seinfeld, though, Louie is less a sitcom than a series of unconnected vignettes; C.K. himself is the only regular character, and events in one segment don’t necessarily connect to events in another. The show was created like a series of indie short films, with C.K. as writer, director, producer, editor and star, and as such the style is a little grittier and more off-kilter than you’d expect from a comedy TV series.

That’s mostly a good thing, though, as it allows C.K. to go to some pretty dark places in his explorations of life after divorce, the horrors of aging and the meager rewards of being an engaged parent. This is not a light show by any means, and unlike Lucky Louie, which had at its heart a sort of affection for corny old-school sitcoms, Louie pulls no punches and refuses to flinch at uncomfortable truths about life. If you aren’t willing to laugh at the looming specter of death or the failures of the American public-school system, then this isn’t the show for you.

But C.K. does a great job of making those and other morbid topics hilarious, and uses his relentless pessimism as a jumping-off point for hilarious riffs and inspired sketches. The disjointed nature of the show may get frustrating after a while (or things may eventually start connecting), but over the course of the first four episodes, it’s more than enough that almost all of the bits are genuinely funny.

Disclosure: A review screener was provided by the network. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.