'Louie': Funny sad

Two of the things I like best about "Louie" were on full display in tonight's episode, "Dogpound." For one thing, the episode nicely showed off how the show gets into the head space of its creator and star, Louis C.K. For another, it displayed how easily the series has created a whole world around its star, a world that consists of a few city blocks, admittedly, but one that feels rich and full of memorable characters. Where most shows struggle to make even one or two memorable characters, "Louie" has done such a good job of filling out its world with interesting people that when characters like Pamela or Louie's brother returned tonight, I knew instantly who they were, without the characters having to remind me. That's hard to do on a show with just one regular character and a number of recurring players who only turn up every few episodes or so, and it's nice to see how confidently the show is setting all of these pieces in motion.

This was one of those episodes that had more of a throughline than some of the earlier episodes, which had two stories that were almost completely disconnected. Granted, there were two separate stories here, but they both made sense within the same larger storyline. Louie's daughters have gone to spend the week with their mother, and he's feeling a little down, as he always gets when they're not around. In the first half, he tries to lift his spirits by hanging out with his downstairs neighbor and smoking some pot. In the second half, he awakens from his night with the neighbor, groggily makes his way to get some coffee, then decides to get a dog to assuage his loneliness. Then, at the end, his daughters return. That's pretty much it.

'Louie': Family day

 About halfway through Tuesday night's episode of "Louie," "Double Date/Mom," Louie says in his stand-up act that if you've ever really loved someone, you've probably hated them at one point too.

He's referring specifically to anyone's mother, to the woman who brings you into the world and takes care of you from childhood, the woman who is often the first person any of us truly, truly loves. Then, of course, as time goes on and we mature and grow apart from our parents, there's less room in our hearts for Mom. We still love her, of course, but she's not what she once was to us.

This is, of course, part of the healthy process of growing up, but some moms never get over it, and neither do some children. Love and hate are so close to each other and so carefully intertwined. Honestly, the idea that if you love someone, you probably hate them too could be mistaken for the theme of this episode, if not the whole series.

The first section of the episode (well, after another visit to Louie's stunningly unhelpful psychiatrist) features Louie and his brother working out at a gym. Up until this point, the series has mostly avoided talking about Louie's family, outside of his daughters. We've heard mention of his ex-wife. We've spent plenty of time in his love life, both past and present. And we've met most of his comedian friends. But so far, the idea of his family beyond his daughters has pretty much just remained an idea. This episode, then, is one of the more cohesive episodes yet in the show's run. Though both tiny story lines are separate, they both focus on bringing Louie's family members into focus, often hilariously.

FX renews 'Louie' for 13-episode second season [Updated]

Fans of FX's dirty yet humane sitcom "Louie" can rejoice, as FX announced a second-season pickup of the comedy Tuesday morning. The second season will run 13 episodes, according to an FX press release. There's no word on when the second season will air, but a summer 2011 return seems like a safe bet. The current season will complete its run with back-to-back episodes on Sept. 7. [Updated at 3:52 p.m.: FX President John Landgraf confirmed that "Louie" will be back in the summer of 2011 at Tuesday's press tour session, according to Hitfix.com.]

The renewal was announced via not safe for work language on the Twitter feed of series creator/writer/director/star Louis C.K., then confirmed by the network in the press release.

“Louis has made a truly original series – a comedy unlike anything on television, but perfect for his unique voice,” said FX president and general manager John Landgraf in the release.

"Louie," which airs at the not-exactly-viewer-friendly time of 11 p.m., actually draws a respectable audience for the time slot, likely a factor in FX deciding to pick up the series. To date, it's averaging 1 million total viewers first-run and 2.5 million total viewers when repeats, DVR playbacks and Internet viewings are taken into account.

-- Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Related articles:

'Louie': Slices of life

'Louie': Coming back down to Earth (in more ways than one)

Complete Show Tracker 'Louie' coverage

---

Clicking on Green Links will take you to a third-party e-commerce site. These sites are not operated by the Los Angeles Times. The Times Editorial staff is not involved in any way with Green Links or with these third-party sites.

---

'Louie': Slices of life

Both segments in Tuesday's episode of "Louie," "Louise" and "Heckler/Cop Movie," play off the inherent differences between reality and reality as presented through the lens of entertainment. In the first, Louie runs into a woman who's decided to not pay attention to his stand-up act on stage and simply plunge forward with her own conversation. The two get into a tense confrontation, which ends with a too-cute button. In the second segment, Louie is offered a job on a remake of "The Godfather" starring Matthew Broderick. (Don't worry, it makes far more sense in the course of the episode.) After he and Broderick get into a similarly tense confrontation (over Louie's lack of acting ability), he wanders into a convenience store to buy a snack and ends up in a standoff with two criminals that resolves itself via the fact that, well, everybody in the store is playing one part or another. Heck, the episode ends with a tag that shows Louis C.K. (the director) giving direction to the actress playing his heckler. It's all a big show, put on for our amusement.

But then, that's true of all filmed entertainment. And the best of it can get at the sorts of things we hold to be most true anyway. This episode of "Louie" was probably a little more about the inside world of being a comedian or the inside world of show business than would be preferred by a lot of people, but it was also a big step up over last week's miss of an episode. The first segment, in particular, was willing to blur the lines between the protagonist being in the right and being a big jerk in a way that not a lot of shows would be capable of. He's really, genuinely mean to the woman who talks over him, in ways that are arguably completely inexcusable, disproportionate responses to what she does.

'Louie': Coming back down to Earth (in more ways than one)

 One of the things I've really liked about "Louie" so far is its gentle humanism. The show is genuinely interested in people being people, and even though series star Louis C.K. has a pretty grim outlook on the human race, that never gets in the way of the fact that no one character on his show is just there to serve as a plot point. I like to look at my favorite books, movies and TV shows and wonder if every character in that story -- no matter how minor -- would be interesting to follow over the course of their very own book, movie or TV show. For most other works, this isn't the case, but it's almost always the case on "Louie," where C.K. has turned even one-scene characters like a comedy club waitress into people with their own lives and points-of-view. It's not an easy feat, but the show carries it off with aplomb.

That's why it pains me to say that I'm not certain that tonight's episode -- "Travel Day/South" -- completely passes this test. It's really easy for those of us on the coasts to make crazy jokes about Southerners or Midwesterners, talk about how they're backwoods bumpkins who believe crazy things and talk with funny accents. Many, many of us (including your author) are from those portions of the country and left to pursue greener pastures. But it's far too easy to slip from good-natured humor into outright mockery, which doesn't treat the characters as human beings but, rather, as objects of derision. The worst example of this was probably that immortal "West Wing" episode "24 Hours in America," wherein the president's staff gets stranded in Indiana and seems to exclusively deal with leftover characters from "Petticoat Junction." Corn pone humor and backwoods shenanigans are as old as American pop culture itself, so perhaps I shouldn't complain. But it is one of my biggest pet peeves.

'Louie': Missed (or fleeting) connections

 "So Old/Playdate" is all about the relationship between the sexes and the relationship between parents and their children. It's, predictably, very funny, and it includes a lot of material that continues to suggest "Louie" is going to try all sorts of different things in telling its stories. The only thing that's been remarkably consistent among all four episodes is that the show has used stand-up segments between the other segments to provide rough connective material.

Tonight, though, the first story is very, very short, the second story sprawls all over the place, and the episode uses Louie's visits to a psychiatrist who offers mostly unhelpful advice as more framing material. Honestly, there's so much stuff going on throughout the episode that it shouldn't work, but it somehow does. I don't know what's in the DNA of this show that makes it so good, but I remain impressed by how often it hits the mark.

I think the best thing about the show right now is that it's built almost completely around relationships. Some of these relationships -- like the two connections Louie makes with women in tonight's episode -- are fleeting. Some -- like his relationships with his friends in the past few episodes -- are ones that stick for years and years. But the show is less interested in telling wildly hilarious stories (though it can do that) and more in showing us snippets of this man's life and meeting the people he cares about. There have been insane stories told -- like Louie's date with the woman who ran off to the helicopter at the end -- but for the most part, this is a quiet, low-key show. It's rather like hanging out with friends at someone's house after the bars close and just talking about whatever comes to mind. More than any other show on TV, "Louie" captures the feel of a 3 a.m. after-bar gab session.

'Louie': Getting older

 Getting older is a tough one to bear. I realize what I'm saying to you won't shock most of you. After all, we all get older, slowly but surely, and eventually, we realize that things are never going to magically reverse. We're not going to keep getting to live the years from 18 to 25 over and over and over. And that means responsibility and taking care of yourself and not doing the stuff that was so fun when you were that age. Now, granted, as you get older, all of this stuff starts to seem way more appealing. I'm only 29, and I can already see the appeal of a Saturday night where you go to bed before midnight and increasingly think my 23-year-old friend's desire to cram his night full of as much activity as possible seems vaguely horrifying. But it's still there. The sense that everything is going downhill. I have no idea what I'm going to be like when I'm standing on the edge of 50. Probably insufferable.

Tonight's episode of "Louie," "Dr. Ben/Nick" attaches a loose theme to both of its vignettes: aging. Louie talks about this a bit in one of the episode's stand-up bits, where he discusses how there's never going to be a year of his life where he looks and feels better than he did the year before, now that he's 42. He's probably right, and that's a remarkably depressing notion, but Louie (Louis C.K., doing some of his own stand-up) makes it amusing through imagining his brain as a computer that needs to reload its program every morning and takes longer and longer to do so because there's always more stuff filling it up. It's a funny segment, yes, and it crystallizes what the show's approach to the world is going to be: Let's take a look at some pretty unappealing stuff that most TV shows wouldn't come within 10 feet of, and let's see if we can't make that stuff funny.

'Louie': A funny, funny man, all alone in the big city

 Louis C.K. is like the ultimate misanthrope. His (very funny) stand-up is based around the idea that things are never so bad that they can't get worse. In one of tonight's two debut episodes of "Louie," his new FX sitcom, he says that buying a puppy is really like just admitting to your family that you've brought home said family crying in a few years. He views true love as, at best, a scenario where you watch your loved one die at the end of life and then spend the last few years of your own life living alone. Needless to say, he's not exactly a puppies and rainbows kind of guy. That's what makes "Louie" so funny. He's put into situations where he's expected to be that guy, and he fails miserably and utterly. 

The best thing about "Louie" is the fact that no episode is exactly the same as the last one. C.K., who writes, directs, stars in and edits every episode, has come up with a rhythm that's somewhere between a more traditional single-camera sitcom and a sketch comedy show. Every episode features him (playing himself, only now his name is spelled Louie) doing some stand-up, then going out into the world and confronting life as a newly single dad who's trying to make sense out of getting divorced in his early 40s after 14 years of marriage. The only thing in his life that he knows he feels good about are his two daughters, whom he cares for, and even then, he doesn't know the line between telling his new date generalities about them and embarrassingly personal information. If you don't like cringe humor (i.e., the kind of humor where you laugh at how uncomfortable the situation is), then you're probably not going to like "Louie." If you love it, like I do, you're going to laugh yourself silly.

Each episode is split into two stories that have little to do with each other aside from the fact that they both feature C.K. wandering around New York and getting into trouble. In the first half hour, he chaperones a school field trip and ends up having to give the bus driver directions when said driver has no idea where anything is (or where the field trip is going to), then he goes on a date for the first time after his divorce and performs disastrously. Now, admittedly, the world keeps throwing newer and weirder oddities in the path of this burgeoning woulda-been love, but C.K. doesn't do himself any favors by sharing stories about his daughter's various infections and weeping at inopportune moments. Nice work, Louie! Still, this dating storyline is probably the funniest of tonight's four vignettes, though that's saying something when all of them are as well-crafted as they are.

The second episode opens with a funny segment that turns surprisingly thoughtful, when a bunch of comedians playing poker turn to a discussion of when it is and isn't appropriate to use a gay slur on stage. One of the comedians is, himself, gay, and he educates his friends on the etymology of the word they like to use, only to find himself just as mocked for his little lesson as he mocks his friends. It's a good depiction both of realizing that something you say may be hurtful to one of your friends and the ways that friends are quick to forgive and just as quick to give each other a hard time. Finally in the second half hour, Louie takes the occasion of his divorce to find an old grade school coulda-been-girlfriend on Facebook, and he's surprised by what he finds. (Of course the girl isn't as attractive as she was back then. But the story goes in a fun direction when the two end up in each other's arms anyway, and their making out is just as clumsy as it might have been when they were youngsters.

Really, "Louie" is less about telling grand, epic stories than it is about finding new and funny ways to show us C.K.'s particular worldview and the ways that the world both disappoints him and meets his expectations exactly. The world of "Louie," like the stand-up of Louis C.K., is a place where something that maybe once had promise can turn on a dime to become completely and utterly hopeless in a single moment. You might go on a date and find yourself confronting a nude old lady next door who clearly wants you to see it all but also wants to accost you for being a "pig" for doing so. Or you might find yourself smiling creepily at your date while riding the subway. Or you might end up talking about your daughters and being unable to share general information. Or you might follow her to wait in line for the bathroom and, through a series of misunderstandings, make her think you have serious anger management issues. Or you might try to kiss her and have her run off to board an inexplicably waiting helicopter. Or all of these things (and more!) might happen to you on the same date.

Watching "Louie" is like being dropped directly into the mindset of C.K. He's a very good writer and a largely competent director and editor. He's mostly just playing himself, so I don't know how much stretching he has to do, but he's remarkably good at playing himself. He has kind of an irritating tendency to frame everything in very tight close-ups, but this also allows for some interesting two-shots, as when Louie and the bus driver are discussing where the Bronx Botanical Gardens is, exactly, and the camera somehow manages to have a narrow strip of both their faces in frame. It's not the world's most handsome looking show, but a minimalist budget probably allows C.K. maximum creative freedom.

And he more than uses it. "Louie" is a surprisingly filthy show for a cable network. There are a couple of bleeps, but, for the most part, anything goes (the dialog from his date about his daughter is a good example). This allows the series a good deal of verisimilitude. It also means I won't be able to quote many of the best quotes in the "other thoughts" section most weeks. For better or worse, this series feels like what it must feel like to hang out with Louis C.K. while he goes about his business. As it turns out, such a thing is frequently hilarious, surprisingly poignant at times and just generally a good time. Check it out.

Some other thoughts:

• * I like the way the stand-up bits act as tie-ins between the storylines, but I'm sure it could get old. The little scene playing under the credits of episode one with Louie taking his kids home and talking about how they needed new shoes is a good example of how the show might try other things to bridge the gaps between stories.
• * "It's 2009, and we still put milk in a little paper box."
• * "They end up drinking out of this finger-filth disease spout."
• * "There are people who are starving in the world, and I drive an Infiniti. I'm evil."
• * "There are people who starve to death, and that's all they ever do."
• * "I've been married for ten years. I'm sorry I'm not the Fonz all over the place."
• * "So what you're saying is gay people are a good alternative fuel source?"

--Todd VanDerWerff (follow me on Twitter at @tvoti)

Photo: Louie (Louis C.K.) does some stand-up on his self-titled show. (Credit: FX)

Related articles:

Television review: 'Louie' on FX

Complete Show Tracker 'Louie' coverage

Complete Show Tracker coverage of FX shows