Louie is one of the most inventive shows on TV. It defies comparison; the closest I can come is Seinfeld meets Murakami. This is a comic’s comedy, and one that demands to be written about. As a television show, Louie is rarely entertaining, at least in the Friends or Cheers sense of “setup-punchline-laffs”. In fact, after the “Subway/Pamela” episode, I can no longer be sure that Louis CK is really even making a sitcom.
This is one of the more jarring episodes of television I have seen in a long time, but the way that Louis CK alienates and disorients his audience is fundamentally different from, say, Breaking Bad. Whatever emotions you feel as Gus Fring suits up, slits a throat, and cleans himself, they occur within the narrative. The resonance is built in-universe. What is Louie’s universe, exactly? The Comedy Cellar, his apartment, and the more neurotic blocks of Manhattan? And what are the stakes? What’s the conflict? He thinks his friend/crush is awesome. His friend thinks he’s alright. Hardly Aristotelian dramatic arc.
Louis CK is not trying to tell a story, nor is he trying to be inventive for the sake of being inventive. He doesn’t play with sitcom tropes like 30 Rock or Community do. The show simply speaks a different language. Where else are you going to find a cold open like “Subway/Pamela”‘s? No one speaks. A hobo washes himself to what I can only imagine is a call-out to Joshua Bell’s publicity stunt. Louie cleans cocaine off a subway seat in his imagination, everyone loves him and he gets head from some random woman on the train. Then the train jerks him from his daydream. Cue opening credits. (Which, by the way, come on. Louie Louie you’re gonna die?!)
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