Louie is back after an excruciating 18-month wait, and thankfully it’s as weird, hilarious, awkward, and occasionally poignant as ever. It’s a truly singular creation; it’s structure doesn’t adhere to any traditional sitcom norms, and the closest Louie comes to serialization is the aging of his daughters, still expertly played by Ursula Parker and Hadley Delany. This is a show that has never been afraid to get surreal (remember that Louie’s agent is played by what is obviously a teenage boy, and David Lynch himself guest-starred for three episodes), so it’s nice to see its fourth season starting with an episode like “Back.”
Here’s how the description of “Back” read on my TiVo: “Louie’s typical day” If you’re familiar at all with his stand-up – which you absolutely should be – you know that no good can come of this. And true to form, “Back” opens with the din of the trash pickup literally exploding into Louie’s bedroom, as the garbage men burst in through the windows, clapping trash can lids like cymbals and throwing refuse all over the place. Then Louie goes to get coffee with recurring guest star Todd Barry, who must get a kick out of playing what I hope is the meanest version of himself. There’s some real malicious glee in his delivery of “Your kids suck and you suck at comedy!” Keep in mind that Louis CK wrote and directed this episode; with all the shit he heaps on himself, his show is like a photo negative of a Woody Allen movie.
Later, Louie blows his back out, and since it has to happen in the most embarrassing way possible, it’s while he’s at a sex shop, pointing out a vibrator he wants to buy. He refuses to take an ambulance, instead making it back to his apartment, where there’s a doctor’s office he seemingly never noticed. Louie is so hallucinatory at times that it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening – remember the time Louie was walking to a date and saw a hobo get decapitated by a bus? So I’m not even sure the doctor’s office is real. But it doesn’t matter. The prognosis is real. Dr. Bigelow (a nicely blase Charles Grodin) basically tells Louie that his back is going to hurt, period. “Every second your back doesn’t hurt is a lucky second. String enough of those seconds together and you’ve got a lucky minute.”
Aging is a recurring theme of “Back.” The episode opens with a bit about Louie’s forty-sixth birthday, which he initially thought was his forty-fifth. “I thought I was forty-four all year! It was like I aged two years instantly.” For a show that can be very downbeat at times, Louie isn’t afraid to let some hope shine through. Even though he’s been told that there’s no cure for his bad back, the end of the episode finds Louie purchasing a Hibachi back massager. He’s still going to give it a shot.
Louis CK might be the best standup comedian alive, which is why its so funny to me that Louie paints him as inept, but occasionally brilliant. The setup for “Model” is Jerry Seinfeld asking Louie to open for him at a benefit show in the Hamptons, which Louie arrives at wearing his usual uniform of black t-shirt and sneakers. He’s been told to make clean jokes, and he flounders, coming up with duds like “Chickens are dumb” and wondering why there hasn’t been a “Martin Luther Chicken.” Ironically, in real life Louis CK is so fucking talented he could probably write five killer minutes about Martin Luther Chicken.
Seinfeld follows Louie, and lambasts him to the crowd of blue-bloods (I like Seinfeld’s willingness to play the heel, as he did in season three’s “Late Night” arc). Louie did manage to entertain one of the guests though, a beautiful model played by Yvonne Strahovski, of Chuck and Dexter (does she have a thing for shows named after men? I gotta get on the phone with CBS and have them greenlight Trevor).
Just to recap, here’s the trajectory of “Louie does a benefit show:”
1. Louie fills in for a sick Tom Papa at a benefit in the East Hamptons
2. Louie bombs
3. Louie is mercilessly skewered by Jerry Seinfeld
4. Louie goes home with a model, and then has sex with her
5. Louie, while being tickled, hits her in the face so hard that it causes permanent vision damage
6. Louie now has to pay her wealthy family $5,000 every month
Aaaand scene. If I wrote that plot description down and showed it to you, you’d probably think it was some weird unpublished story by Raymond Carver or John Cheever. But no, that is the madness and the effusive brilliance that is Louie. Welcome back.
“Back:” 4 Stars
“Model:” 4.5 Stars
Total Score: I’m gonna go with 4.5
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