Dear Television,

The title of Girls Season 2 Episode 1 was “It’s About Time” — referring, exactly, to what? What is it we’ve been waiting for? Hannah’s (kind of, sort of) split from Adam? Marnie’s (kind of, sort of) return to Charlie? The return of the show itself? Probably mostly the latter: “It’s About Time” was a pretty conventional season premiere in that it mostly just eased us back into the milieu the last season had already established, concerning itself more with tone than with plot, character development, or theme.

Still, time was a theme, of sorts. Dunham has opted for the now-commonplace narrative gambit of skipping over an unspecified period of time (seemingly a couple of months) between seasons, so that a number of important events have occurred in the interim. (How is there not a TV Tropes entry for this practice?) Hannah is now having sex with Sandy (Donald Glover), unbeknownst (presumably) to Adam, who she is (reluctantly) nursing back to health after his accident; her gay ex-boyfriend Elijah has moved into her apartment, and is (platonically) sharing her bed; Shoshanna and Ray made some attempt at a relationship which fizzled out, due in part to her profligacy with emoji; Jessa and Thomas-John have been on a long honeymoon in Mexico (frankly, it would have been fine with me if they’d stayed there). Time marches on!

What I noticed most in this episode, though, were not the principals but the disaffected older characters, like Marnie’s embittered, narcissistic mom (Rita Wilson, playing against cutesy-pie type), or Elijah’s older boyfriend George, who has a karaoke-induced meltdown and then chastises the kids at Hannah and Elijah’s housewarming party for not having the right kind of fun (“When I was your age, I was snorting cocaine on twinks and dancing with my tits out!”). It’s interesting that the older people in Girls are frequently either attempting to re-enter the magic circle of twentysomething culture (like Jessa’s boss Jeff from last season) or passing angry judgment on it — or, in George’s case, both.

This intensifies a device Girls was already using intermittently last season: introducing older people at the story’s margins (most often parents, teachers, and bosses) in order to admit a corrective self-consciousness — or the possibility of self-consciousness — into the show’s mostly hermetic post-collegiate universe. Sometimes these older characters have some wisdom to dispense, but what we mostly see in them is a longing to return to youth, coupled with a scorn for how the young people of today are wasting it or doing it wrong. (“You look — can I be honest? — 30 years old,” Marnie’s mother tells her; translation: you don’t appreciate what you have, and you’re about to lose it.) It’s to Dunham’s credit that she can write convincingly for people over 30, but it must be said that she also takes a kind of sadistic pleasure in humiliating these characters, or emphasizing their most pathetic aspects: the scene where Hannah locks George out of the party (while still insisting, over his protests, that she’s “a sweet girl”) is both a case in point and a good allegory for the show’s general strategy vis-à-vis grown ups.

I wonder if, to some extent, the marginal presence of these voyeuristic, disapproving adults is Dunham’s way of working through the staggering amount of attention she’s received since the first season’s premiere. Much has been made of how popular Girls is with the generation it depicts, but it’s also, clearly, a source of continual fascination for older people as well, many of whom are vaguely (or not so vaguely) perplexed and disapproving. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the course of the season. If the last season (or the episodes Dunham directed, anyway) had a preternatural confidence, this one came closer to swagger: the final shot of Dunham stripping felt like a real manifesto moment, since nudity — and particularly Dunham’s nudity — has been the catalyst for so much of the aforementioned perplexity and disapproval. It emphasized something that’s too easily missed: that Dunham shooting herself naked isn’t just an exhibitionistic compulsion, or a sign of millennial shamelessness, or (pace Howard Stern) a “little fat chick trying to get something going,” but a directorial signature.

On a shamelessly exhibitionistic note, glad to be back in the fold here at Dear Television! Looking forward to hearing what the rest of you have to say.

I talk to my friends way worse than this,

Evan

The first thing Dear TV ever covered was the first season of Girls, to which we shall return this coming week over at the Los Angeles Review of Books. To receive updates on posts, like our Facebook page! In the meantime, enjoy a stroll down memory lane with this index of our own first season. At the beginning, we only roughly tied our posts to episodes, so, be forewarned:

Episode Five

“Act like my life is real, y’know? Because my life is real.” / Jane

“Testing, Testing” / Evan

“American Nervousness, 2012″ / Phil

Episode Six

“Never Don’t Worry: In Which Dunham Kills Horror” / Lili

“There Is No Lena, Only Zuul” / Phil

“How are things in Ohio?” / Evan

“Call Me, Maybe” / Jane

Episode Seven

“A Theory of Crackuracy” / Phil

“Bushwick Bildungsroman” / Evan

“Turn On, Drop In, Drop Out” / Jane

Episode Eight

“Makeovers, Makeunders, and Makeouts” / Lili

“The Economy of Friendship” / Jane

“Risky Business” / Evan

Episode Nine

“The Eyes of Kathryn Hahn” / Phil

“Killing Carrie Bradshaw” / Lili

Episode Ten

“The Marriage Plot” / Jane

“Bottoms Up” / Phil

This week, your friends at Dear Television covered episodes of New Girl and The Mindy Project, both of which were helpfully titled, “Halloween.” We also began a new tradition for our syndication at The Los Angeles Review of Books: death matches! From now on, we will not only be writing about issues of gender, class, and adorkability, we’ll also be judging these shows as a Battle of the Thirtysomething Lady Sitcoms. Check us out at the LARB to see who took the crown this week…

NEW GIRL, THE MINDY PROJECT, and the HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

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Jane Hu: Shiny Red Lame Special On how The Mindy Project‘s in-costume episode was a gamble that ended up revealing the new show’s strength and depth:

While New Girl waited an entire season before taking on the Halloween special, Mindy Project aired their first last night, with only three episodes preceding it. The fact that it worked — that it was, at least for me, the best episode yet — speaks to Mindy Project’s success in setting out (and setting up) its characters so that they still speak to us even when dressed up as other characters.

And, furthermore, how Halloween Specials show us the profound joys of being recognized:

Given television’s theatrical and metavisual qualities, Halloween seems more suited to the medium than Christmas. Halloween specials remind us that characters are always already remodeled after prior characters — that they are always already in costume. Last week, Leslie Knope dressed up Rosie the Riveter in Parks and Recreation.

If one missed the reference, the costume and its attendant allusions would fall flat. Given that Parks & Rec jokes frequently rely on cultural references, however, one would suspect that its dedicated viewers would have easily recognized Rosie… New Girl and Mindy Project did the same. Jokes about Woody Allen! Jokes about Woody Allen’s tribute to the Marx Brothers! Diane from Cheers! Josh dresses up as Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride, since it’s Mindy’s favorite film. But when Mindy quotes from the film, Josh doesn’t recognize it — and Josh is, like, really white.

Oh, Josh.

***

Lili Loofbourow: Peanuts and the Perils of the Perfect Costume On how The Mindy Project locked it down this week:

Romantic comedies are like ice-skating (or, you know, any other sport): you know what you’re going to get, but the pleasure lives in the virtuosic disruptions of the format. QUADRUPLE-LUTZ! NO-HITTER! Kaling’s pulling this off, delivering solid formula along with some genuinely impressive moves. The show’s pleasure is as much in its grace notes as in the overfamiliar melody (“the brown Bridget Jones,” as Subashini Navaratnam put it). Scenes that should be throwaways do a little extra work.

And on how one of those throwaway exchanges helped crystallize Mindy Lahiri as a character:

When Mindy puts a jabbering kid on the phone, we all know what the next move is and what this scene is meant to tell us. Mindy will be good or bad with kids and that will show us A) how selfish she is and B) how much she wants kids (and therefore a man). That’s the point of kids in sitcoms about thirty-something women. That is the only way we’ve ever seen these chess pieces move with respect to each other. But no — Mindy actually sees this kid…Mindy’s childishness, her selfishness, her self-centeredness, all have the interesting side effect of letting her be a better friend because she’s not performing goodness. She’s refusing the Goodness Scoreboard. That’s an interesting brand of unlikeability.

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Phil Maciak: Good Grief On how New Girl is strong on character/weak on plot, and Mindy Project is the opposite:

How on earth is it possible that a 30-year-old woman, growing up in America with an encyclopedic knowledge of romantic comedies and a television addiction — Mindy Kaling, in other words, who just executive produced an episode of television based around the message of It’s a Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — has never heard of Peanuts? Who is Mindy Lahiri? Who are any of these people?

And on how hard it is for these two shows to create original characters from the set of archetypes and stale formats given to them by television and rom-com history:

The hot doctor. The spinster with no prospects. The man who goes where he wants, when he wants. The cool witty girl who kind of kills it in bed. The douche. The psycho. The dork. In their least interesting moments, the characters on these shows exist as either embodiments or comical inverses of these types. At their best, these characters mama-bird their types — ingesting them and regurgitating them in new forms. (Sorry.)

***

Get up in the comments section at LARB as we track more quadruple-lutzes, possible no-hitters, and missed Peanuts references this week!

Dear Television is over at the Los Angeles Review of Books discussing New Girl and The Mindy Project. BATTLE OF THE LADY SHOWS. Join us!

Here’s an index of what we’ve covered so far:

Week 1 of New Girl and The Mindy Project

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Phil Maciak: Groove is in the Heart. Of women in comedy, and why we chose New Girl and The Mindy Project. Despite its early twee-ness,

“New Girl began to feel less precious and more lived-in… and even managed to offer a super-convincing meta-argument for its ethnography of Dork-Americans.” The Mindy Project pilot, in contrast, “felt a lot like a good college admissions essay: super-tight, clear voice, well-defined thesis and themes, plenty of poignant self-analysis, copy-edited and structured to within an inch of its life.”

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Jane Hu: A Serial Takeover. Of television as a medium:

If one premise of Mindy Project is what happens to the rom-com movie when transferred to the medium of television — with all its attendant sit-com formulas — then I am more than game.

On what generational comedy means now.

A generational comedy of 30-somethings in 2012 rarely fails to poke fun at the extended adolescence of 30-somethings in 2012. Mindy can no longer “have what she’s having,” since she’s arrived at that particular meal too late. Instead, she possesses only the blueprints of a marriage plot that no longer fits her life and times.”

***

Lili Loofbourow: Party Girl vs. Rom-Com Girl.  Both shows are trying to fight their respective stereotypes by exposing difference where you expect sameness–in New Girl, by putting Parker Posey next to  Zooey Deschanel, the other indie queen, and showing the mismatch.  In The Mindy Project, a different rescue is attempted:

If you’re a girl, the romantic comedy has been one of the few places where female protagonists a) exist and b) are allowed some kind of interiority… Kaling is building on this starved generation’s super-detailed knowledge of the romantic comedy corpus, and on its hunger for some kind of legitimacy.

Week 2 of New Girl and The Mindy Project

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Jane Hu, When Worlds Collide. On space and the sit-com:

 I started to see all sitcoms — all stories really — in terms of worlds that undergo continual threats of invasion. The basic axiom of narrative is, after all, how a constant (premise, group, space) must recalibrate itself to a sequence of incoming events, persons, or data.

New Girl is more conventional in pretty completely excluding the world of work from the show and focusing on home, unlike The Mindy Project, which has yet to explore Mindy’s apartment. Then there’s the question of social space: Jess and Mindy approach those spaces, and whether they mix, differently:

Jess struggles in keeping her relationship with Nick (friend and roommate) separate from her relationship with Sam; Mindy, however, has no qualms with worlds colliding. Well aware that all good stories rely on just-believable chance encounters, she encourages them.

***

Lili Loofbourow, Romney-Dad: Conservatives Back in Comedy. On the lack of true eccentricity in New Girl:

New Girl is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs where the dwarfs have been attenuated: Nick is Slightly Grumpy, Schmidt is Slightly Dopey, and Winston is Kinda Doc.

New Girl’s peculiarity is that its B story is almost always more interesting than its A story.

Here, in the middle of an ugly electoral season, the show pauses to dwell on Romney’s possibilities as the ideal father, and it’s brilliant. Romney would be a perfect sitcom dad — if sitcoms still had dads.

The Mindy Project has its token conservative too, and it’s the male lead.

***

Phil Maciak, Moby-Nick, Or The Whale Belt. New Girl seems to be saying, “Buy in to this vague, implausible stalling tactic for a season, and we’ll get them in the sack eventually.”

“Fluffer,” as a kind of summit meeting about the state of this relationship, was a canny piece of writing, but I’m not sure it plugged the holes it sought out to plug.

More importantly, though, class! the  major players on The Mindy Project are RICH. Is Schmidt’s whale belt a Class Transcender?

So what kind of magic belt is this? Is it a kind of hipster-post-racial utility belt? Not quite. The simple answer is that the belt fits at the center of the Kanye West/Mitt Romney Venn diagram, and the thing these two men have in common is the thing they also have in common with Mindy Lahiri and Danny Castellano: they are rich. Rockefeller and Roc-a-fella.

WEEK 3 OF NEW GIRL AND THE MINDY PROJECT

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Lili Loofbourow, Of In-Groups and Out-Groups. What happens when characters try to work outside their social systems?

In both cases, the protagonists end up choosing their original in-group over the more desirable out-group, but both episodes stage the seduction of wanting badly to belong, even as you understand that your winning has nothing to do with your own merit.

But, as usual, the show continues to forget about Winston.

I hope the show finds its sweet spot with Winston, because I feel like he’s fading into a joke accessory — he’s the guy whose weirdness only lasts one episode: he likes fruity drinks! He doesn’t get pranks! He wears a peacock earring!

***

Phil Maciak, How to Crush It. Can a douchebag outrun his douchebaggery? Or can it only be that

he’s not any better than you thought he was, there’s just more in there.

Should Mindy pay up at the Douchebag Jar?

The Mindy Project [...] sometimes doesn’t seem to have any distance from what it depicts. The camera on The Mindy Project is very subjective, and I think it might have d-bag goggles on.

***

Jane Hu, A Toast to the Douchebags. What do we really mean when we say douchebag?

From the New Girl pilot, Schmidt was dubbed “feminine” as much as “douchebag,” and that women don’t find Schmidt sexually attractive might have something to do with how he reminds them of what society expects a woman to be.

For Mindy, the club becomes a ballroom:

The modern girl’s fairy tale still involves ballrooms, red carpets, a gate at the stairs, and a carriage ready to take one home.

WEEK 4 OF NEW GIRL

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Phil Maciak, Dance, Monkey, Dance. Is New Girl using its fat suit for cheap laughs?

They lean so hard into it that you are tempted to think they are making fun of the trope. But, of course, that’s what critics like us say when shows we perceive to be smarter than the conventions they employ go ahead and employ those conventions. And there’s no way out. No matter how much self-consciousness we ascribe to New Girl or Mindy or Girls, Fat Schmidt is still getting laughs for being Fat.

Sometimes, love just hurts so bad:

To know someone well enough to tease them the way Nick teases Schmidt is to have a kind of intimacy.

***

Jane Hu, Soul Cakes. Guys — are we giving New Girl too much credit?

Sometimes, a fat suit is just a fat suit. It seems that for New Girl — a show that certainly doesn’t lack attractive bodies — fatness has become a throw-away gimmick.

How stereotypically gendered are the New Girl characters’ relations to food?

Schmidt gets Nick a cookie, which he eats, and then regrets, because of what giving a cookie means. Jess bakes Cece a birthday cake, which she, as a model, can’t eat, because of what a cake does.

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Lili Loofbourow, Go Back to Start, Do Not Pass Go. New Girl seems to be trying to wean itself off serial storytelling, since

A story about twenty-somethings (or thirty-somethings) is a story about precariousness, fluctuation, change. People marry, they move, they go out of town for jobs. The point of the roommate story is that it’s always already nostalgic. You go into a roommate situation knowing that it will end.

Finally, we might have missed the view from The Mindy Project a bit this week:

The other really interesting difference that’s already emerging (and will only intensify, I expect) is that The Mindy Project is aggressively structured through one perspective.

God, I loved these two episodes. Loved ‘em for the thrills, the gossipy content (Late Night wars!), but also, and mainly, because of their weird chains of causality. Tom Cruise doesn’t like surprises, so Louie goes on The Tonight Show. The maid refuses to Not Disturb, and it’s thanks to her that he gets up, checks his phone, and makes it to his meeting with the head of CBS. These are chains of causality we know: a crazy person explains to you that a remote control is counterintuitive, then murder suicides his whole family. This, in some deep, deep way, is the world we live in.

It’s not like surrealism is new to Season 3 of Louie, but sometimes (for me, anyway) Louie’s been hitting his uncanny baseballs out of the park. It’s a home run, sure, but I’d rather see the ball, catch it, take it home. If I had to group the show’s balls (So To Speak) into two camps, then Uncle X and Bizarro-Louie are In, and so is everything up to and including the window breaking in Dad, but the runaway scene is Out. Never-the-kid shitting in the tub is in—so’s throwing the rug out the window. Never causing traffic accidents and eating raw meat is out. Parker Posey’s in, Chloe Sevigny’s out. Ramón and all of Miami is in, along with Maria Bamford, Mark Maron, crabs, and even the crazy pharmacist grilling the lady on her bowel movements. When the surrealism gets too broad, it starts to get too dream-sequencey. If you’ve ever taught creative writing, then you know how legendary the And Then I Woke Up ending is, and by legendary I mean universal and lame.

Louis CK’s at his best when he’s showing us the inside of Louie’s head while showing us the outside world too in a way that shows the angle of distortion. The distinction I’m asking for is exactly the one he makes in Late Night: Part 2, when the show cuts between Louie watching Jackie Doll on the monitor with the music-glory vs. Jackie in “real life”.

Speaking of surrealism going outside the stadium, I watched all of Twin Peaks this last spring. When it ended I understood how everyone who watched Lost and complained about it endlessly truly felt. It’s a THERE IS NO GOD feeling. It stinks, because you’ve invested so much energy and thought in a show, trying to work out its premises, how it’s coding its mysteries, and then it turns out it was all just sort of slapped together with no real plan. Crazy lady with an eye patch! Ha, she’s strong! Um, cousin who looks exactly like Laura! Evil owls! A fake diary and a real diary! Dwarf! Giant! Billy Zane!

Not that I don’t like Twin Peaks—I have real affection for it in retrospect and I think parts of it are amazing mood pieces, but that doesn’t change the Disappointment With Dave. He’s SO the Wizard of Oz after Dorothy’s gone behind the curtain.

And that’s what Louis CK keeps offering us—here! He keeps saying. I’m drawing the curtain back! Here’s comedian world. Here’s single fatherhood. Here’s what late-show negotiations are like. And that’s what differentiates Louis CK from Lynch: where Lynch withholds information and turns plot points into shallow riddles, Louis just keeps giving you all the answers.

“Five years ago you probably peaked,” says the CBS guy, one of many Men Behind the Curtain in the Late Night series.  “You do standup. You make 80,000 a year on your club dates. You don’t think you can do it. You think it’s over and you’re afraid to try. … I’ve seen it, and I’ve seen it turn around.”

CBS knows EVERYTHING. But it won’t lie about the future. The CBS guy is part Wizard and part Sphinx, just as powerful, just as vast in its perspective, and just as honest about how the world works:

“If the test is good, I’ll put you on the air. And then, if you’re a hit, everyone will think I’m a genius, and I’ll have saved the network about 12 million. If America hates you, no one’s gonna blame me. … But you’ll take the heat on all that. You’re gonna crack your head on the ceiling and you’re gonna go down, probably for good. “

Do you have chills? Because that’s a novel right there. Who puts that idea—that crazy enormous modern-day Rise of Silas Lapham of an idea—into the mouth of a CBS executive? HOLY COW. This is Satanic temptation meets genie meets, I don’t know, Indecent Proposal.

And there’s more!

“Look Louie, we’re talking about the big game here, so forgive me if I use big terms. Here’s the reality. In ten years you’re gonna be teaching comedy at a community college to support your kids, and falling asleep to the Late Show with Jerry Seinfeld. You’re circling failure in a rapidly decaying orbit. … But it’s in your power to change that.”

And this is where Part 1 ends—beautifully, because it could so easily have made the point of the episode Louie’s Yes or Louie’s No. Instead, it leaves the viewer with the agonizing question in the air. WHAT WOULD YOU DO?

Let’s just pause for a minute and think about how much less interesting this scene would have been if we were seeing it only through Louie’s anxious eyes. Say the CBS exec started getting bigger and bigger in the room while Louie got younger and younger. It would have been SO stupid, right, because that’s what’s happening anyway. The next episode is all about Louie being surrounded by Dads.

Louis CK downplays his smarts, which makes him better than Lynch in the sense that he’s (supposedly) keeping our expectations low. See his explanation of how he hired the actress who plays Janet for an example of this Oh, I Just Decided And Fuck It Everyone Will Be Fine With It sort of attitude. But let’s face it: dude’s a genius, and it would su-u-u-ck if he wasn’t putting serious thought into this stuff, which he obviously is. It’s no coincidence that the index cards in the background of wherever Jay Leno’s calling from say “Adam Smith,” “Products For A Better You,” and “Halloween Products.” There it all is: cutthroat competition, Louie’s self-improvement program, and Jay’s scare tactics.

But anyway, back to the chain of causality. Things in Late Show: Parts I and II are good and bad in pretty stupid ways in the moment (damn the maid! She woke me up!), but those outcomes are actually just steps toward some bigger, blustery whole. (Shot at the Late Show! Thank the maid!) Nothing in the world really connects to anything else the way it’s supposed to: that you were flown into LA for The Tonight Show in no way guarantees that you are going to perform on The Tonight Show. But there’s slant continuity, to use Jane’s coinage: you’ll always get either much more or much less than you want. Having planned 4.5 minutes for late-night television, you’re either going to get bumped or else you’ll just stay, pointing finger-guns at the audience, forever.

The trouble is that there’s no right vantage-point from which to look at the future. The end of Late Night: Part 1 is a true cliff-hanger, and the head of CBS is every inch the Satanic tempter as the music plays mournfully behind him.

What surrealism there is (how many different phones were ringing in Louie’s hotel room by the time he picked up?), it all feels extremely real. The baseball is within the stadium. Take these old men asking you to do truly odd things, then blaming you a little for not getting it right. They blow past your faults too, that’s how little you matter. “You don’t need to tell ‘em your name, son.” And yet, if you’re Louie, you have all these new dads who keep throwing you in the water, giving you black eyes.

And oh, what a precious kind of surrealism that is, because it’s damn close to how different generations see each other anyway. The Old Men in the business of show communicate telegraphically, so accustomed are they to being read correctly and to having their frame of reference be the only frame. “Carnegie Deli,” says the head of CBS after calling the lawyer in, and we waffle off-balance, like Louie, trying to figure out what to do with those words. Is Carnegie Deli the lawyer’s name? Is it a part of speech? There’s no context for what those two words mean, but they’re hovering in the air, awaiting a response.  By the time we’ve recognized the phrase, it’s too late—the conversation has moved on. “Timing is everything,” says David Lynch, after Louie fails to perform an activity that Jackie Doll seems to think is Telling A Joke.

Do Not Turn This Off, says the index card in Jackie Doll’s booth, Just Turn The Intensity Down.

I do want to register a minor complaint re: Janet’s conversation with Louie, and it’s that their talk felt too rational. These people are divorced. They coparent, certainly, but there’s a painful past locked up there. Aaron Bady, with whom I was watching this episode, observed that when Louie tells Janet his news and she immediately says, “Cuz you’re cheap,” there should have been a moment of annoyance. I felt that when she says, “You’d have a job” and he says “I have a job,” his annoyance, his sip of water, the  bad silence that follows–it all suggests something bigger than what comes next. Their body language is great. It’s uncomfortable, and bitter.  That sounds like an old fight, and no such fight gets sipped away. If you’re Janet in that fight, if you spent years being mad because Louie’s job wasn’t reliable (and it sounds like it was an issue, even though she says she appreciated him supporting them), you push that harder, you don’t just zoom out into a reflection on his career arc and say, in a moment of generosity: this is what it’s all been building up to. “If you don’t do this, what was it all for. … What did I put my nine [years] in for?”

But that’s beside the point. The real object of that conversation (besides reestablishing Louie’s passivity and need to have every woman with whom he comes in contact explain him to himself) is to redefine the Right Thing To Do. We’ve talked a lot here at Dear TV about how central Louie’s fatherhood is to the show, so for Janet to redefine what being a good father means for Louie is a big deal. “You’ve been a fine father, but nobody needs a father that much,” she says. YOWCH. His job isn’t to be there for the kids, she says, reestablishing a definition of masculinity and fatherhood that’s as old as the Reagan and Nixon jokes. His job is to make it.

And that achieves something remarkably interesting: it means that Louie, in order to be a good father, has to submit to this old crop of show-business fathers at the very moment he’s losing his brother Chris Rock, who shaved and ditched the collar and donned the infamous late-night suit. I’m looking forward to seeing how this goes.

No today jokes yet. You’re not ready.

Lili

I left off last time on the topic of vehicles, and particularly that bus in “Looking for Liz/Lily Changes.” Since then, I’ve been waxing symbolic on all the possibilities in choosing bus over car, but I’ll spare you. Here’s just one thing I liked about that directorial decision:

• When I wonder why Louie brings his daughters home on the bus (instead of the car we know he owns), I remember that broken car window from last week’s episode
• Then I remember that the wrecked car was a rented one.

This kind of slant continuity—punctured narrative logic—seems, whether C.K. means it to be, representative of his show.

There has been greater continuity in Louie this season. Does this account for why some of us have reservations about it (to glance at the off-screen dialogue surrounding Dear Television)? Prior seasons were more episodic and disjointed, while this one carries single narratives not just across an entire episode, but two, and now apparently three. Could hesitations about this season be a product of its increased continuity and lengthier storylines? If so, these hesitations are also contingent on the continuous storyline’s resistance to commit all the way. As Lili mentioned, sometimes an episode’s ending just takes it a few vehicles too far.

Premises and characters reappear across this season, but they might as well be different people. Posey’s character has popped up in three separate episodes thus far, but in each she possesses an entirely different character. Yes, it’s important that Liz continues to haunt Louie, but it does seem that her role mostly serves to give him greater—not less—room to develop his own narcissistic and increasingly claustrophobic perspective. Is he really growing then? We can logic away Liz’s incongruous characteristics by diagnosing her as bi-polar, but as Lili queried: what about Louie? Sometimes a storyteller can only push so far until his audience grows suspicious, and then even weary, of him.

Jeanie, Chloë Sevigny’s character, tells Louie: “Make it meant to be.” What a thought! Since that is summarily what C.K. does with his show all the time. Riding a stolen motorbike followed by a stolen boat? Don’t mind if I do! I loved all of Sevigny’s lines, which could alternately read as Creative Writing How-Tos: 

• “’It wasn’t meant to be’ is bullshit.”
• “You have to go through something to get what you want.” 

Finally it does seem like she’s encouraging herself more than her interlocutor, especially since Louie (or is it Louis?) already knows all that.

I’m nit-picking. Why can’t I just relax and enjoy the show? At night, I lose sleep, worrying it’s my “Asian suffering.” It’s funny when entire ethnicities function as throwaways in a punch-line about white privilege. Funny-funny, actually. But beside the point.

On stage—dolling out joke after joke—Louie appears as his most reliably “continuous” character. There, his job literally is to remain funny, confident, and in control—all of which he very much is. To make the jokes “meant to be.” Walking backstage after his opening routine in “Late Show: Part 1,” Louie meets Ross Mark (a producer from The Tonight Show), who praises him for his controlled storytelling:

The order’s terrific, […] But the great thing is also that it timed in at four minutes and thirty seconds, which is the perfect—the perfect—amount of time. I mean with the audience reaction and everything else, for our studio, it’s the time we’re looking for.

As we find out throughout the episode, such seemingly undetected timing can go a long way. Back stage, Louie is confronted and controlled by make-up and wardrobe, schedulers and show-runners, like clockwork. On stage, he is a viral success. Thanks to Tom Cruise for ducking out at the eleventh hour. Let’s not forget, as well, C.K.’s own control of his environment, filled with personal touches, such as the imagined TV posters (The Big House) in the CBS office.

“Late Show: Part 1” gestures at how media manufactures what looks like luck and timing to bring us celebrities, successful shows, or even simply a successful stand-up routine. In his “behind the scenes” meeting with Louie, Gerry Marshall lays out the potential plots that could follow Louie’s acceptance of his offer to host late night. They don’t sound like predictions so much as promises, or threats. The music in this scene is particularly dramatic (one can’t help but notice!), as though emphasizing the codes of media manipulation it accompanies. These exaggerated dramatic effects work to bolster the scene’s artificiality. Simultaneously, they drive home Louie’s own unmanufacturedness. He didn’t bring a jacket to Leno! He’s a late riser! Totally blind-sided by his overnight success! Even in an episode with such a narrative through-line, one can feel jerked about.

Is it working for you guys? Can Louie have it both ways? Can it spotlight Louie as a naturally lucky natural, even while reminding us that Louis is working overtime, meticulous and editorial, behind it all?

That out-take of Ed Gelbin at the end isn’t just there for kicks; it’s not just some quirky leftover. These closing “marginal” shots are very much centred and placed—as much so as the close of “Hecker/Cop Movie,” which assures viewers C.K. is the good guy, and Louie the bad.

Testing, testing,

Jane

I would apologize for being so very late on my response to Lili’s wonderful recaps (three episodes!), but it would mean repeating a narrative we’re all familiar with. Belated apologies, nonetheless: Louie’s and mine (but mostly mine).

Apologies are difficult. As Louie shows in “IKEA/Piano Lessons,” they’re often best repressed to the point of being forgotten. When Maron explains to Louie that they’ve already had this conversation five years ago, Louie comes off even more the jackass. Does he have to apologize for having forgotten to apologize now too? Does it matter since the sincerity behind all Louie’s apologizes has now plummeted to hover right above zero? If Louie’s initial apology to Maron comes from not realizing that they fell out over an issue entirely Louie’s fault, then how much are we urged to believe that all of Louie’s estrangements are founded on an ability to blame the other (so as to obliterate his own guilt)? It does begin to seem that all relationships—all scenarios—in Louie could go either way: “fuck you, or sorry.”

As Lili writes, “Everything that’s wrong is everyone’s fault, probably, but the point is something else.” The pointed finger also often falls somewhere else, until (as shown in the final scene of “IKEA/Piano Lessons”) it returns directed at one’s own chest. And again, and on, and on.

While many note the elements of surprise and off-model counterintuitiveness that energize Louie, the show often feels to me like a continuous circle—or at least a spiral. There is a kind of balance to the episodes—and I don’t just mean in how the frequently dash-split titles weigh one premise exactly against another. No matter what, we always return to Louie—and there is stability, predictability, and safety in that. As the show grows increasingly claustrophobic in its Louie-inflected dream sequences (“Dad”!), Lili suggested that Louie might be a tad insane. It’s true that the surrealness of some episodes might stretch our systems of realism and belief, but if we’re willing to buy into the fact that Louie’s world is, well, Louie’s, then any train of stolen vehicles also feels routine.

Much later, yes, let’s talk about Dad.

That title is great! It implies a dash without drawing a typographical one. There’s Louie as dad, opening the episode by castigating the virtuosic Jane for playing the violin. Then there’s Uncle Ex (a sort of surrogate dad to Louie), treating him to Cornish hens at an expensive restaurant Louie would otherwise probably not frequent. There’s, of course, the illusive literal dad (and figural Dad) of Louie’s, who we never see because son flaps like a young hen and chickens out just as dad’s shadow approaches the door.

Having two actual dads (Louie’s and then Louie himself) seems too much for one title, not to mention one scene. As Uncle Ex colourfully describes with a condom metaphor, the encounter at some point might just become too close: “Between the father and the son there can be no separation. No boundary. A father calls; A son answers. A father beckons; A son comes.” What happens, though, when the son becomes his own kind of father, as Louie so clearly is at the start of “Dad“?

Moreover, what happens when you’re both dad and single dad, yet still someone’s son? The existential crisis was worked out beautifully right up until the hallucinated end (unlike Lili, I adored it—found it perfectly nonsensical in its flight from frantic sprint, to stolen motorcycle, and finally stolen boat; a fish out of Boston waters).  As single dad, Louie tells Jane to finish her homework (“Go to your room!”), and then picks up a pile of dirty laundry. This scene is followed by Louie arriving at an electronics store in a huff, interrupting a bro circle between four coworkers there, which leads me to my next point:

What are the resonances between infantilization and threatened masculinity? Problems of fatherhood (for father—and now for child) often mix with problems of masculinity in Louie. The show is fascinating in how it often swirls and blurs these two topics and positions. There can be no separation.

At the Russian Tea Room, Uncle Ex orders for Louie, who responds with an “Uh…O–K?” look on his face, a rather child-like response. Who was this grown man to be ordering for this other grown man? Except they are family, and such things are often difficult to change. “This is for Life Louie,” his uncle emphasizes, “for life.” In order to convince Louie to visit his father, he works on his nephew’s sentimental side, telling him how his father cries “like a woman.” Of course this line is said with mocking disparagement, for Uncle Ex likes to make clear the divide between genders. In illustrating Louie’s eternal bond to his father, he compares it against the condom-wall erected between men and women. Between the father and the son there can be no separation. In “Miami,” Ramon tells Louie: “When my uncle says all men are brothers, it’s true right?” An uncle can say that—but can a father?

But Uncle Ex isn’t Louie’s father, ultimately, and he won’t be there to clean up the vomit his words inspire. Louie throws up while playing poker with his all-but-one-male comedian cohort, though the one who responds with “Sweetie, are you okay?” is of course Sarah Silverman. (She cracks jokes during this boy’s club, making fun of another man’s childhood masturbatory habits, but she’s also the girl who’s just terrible at poker!) Like single dads and children, women and children can be conflated and then sorta equated.

Such are the jokes of sausage fests, but here–in the middle of one on porn–Louie vomits. And he just can’t seem to stop. A taste of his own medicine sends Louie to the doctor where he lists his recent diet: “Cornflakes, pizza, Cornish hen.” Sounds like he needs some taking care of. There’s also the question of moms, women, single fatherhood, masculinity, and children I’d like to explore especially in regard to “Lilly Changes.” Lili asks, “Why do all the moms at the school…only trust and confide in him?” Another question: “Why only moms at the school?”

Like an infant, Louie starts losing control of his body, and then gradually his mind. His car window suddenly bursts, but if we’re to follow Uncle Ex’s Freudian logic, there might be a broken mirror in there somewhere too.

“Be a man. You’re 44 years old. It’s your fault!” the car rental saleswoman shouts at him. Another woman’s voice comes across the car mapping device: “Why are you being such a little pussy about this? He’s your father. It’s not like he touched your dick or something.” Don’t be a pussy, Louie, and please don’t be a girl—but oh whatever you do, please leave another dude’s dick out of this. “Think about that you queer,” a muscular Boston man tells Louie after their cars bump one another. He’s had to do with a dead father, so why is Louie so nervous about visiting his own live one?

There are many vehicles in the world of Louie, and while some of them add to his masculinity (motorcyclesmotorcyclesmotorcycles), others take away (Laurie’s truck, or not wanting to strap his daughters’ seatbelts because that would mean getting his hands dirty). There’s a bus scene in the next episode that I want to linger on, since it feels off (Doesn’t Louie own a car? Did he really have it totaled then?), but I’ll leave that for the next post.

Again, SORRY,
Jane

I was out of the country for the last three episodes, and I’ve only just caught up with Louie. Three episodes at a gulp. It felt like a dram of intensely, specifically non-eerie surrealism. If there was ever a question as to whether Louie was moving toward the short story as a form, there isn’t one any longer. Parker Posey. Robin Williams. Sarah Silverman. Marc Maron. And now, F. Murray Abraham. The show is starting to feel like a comedian’s dreamscape—a way of living inside Louis CK’s subconscious. Comedy is becoming the claustrophobic ether in which the show swims—more so than New York, than fatherhood, than solitude, than sex.

In “IKEA / Piano Lesson,” comedians see each other’s younger avatars on TV and call each other in real time to watch the people they were and the result isn’t exactly (or only) friendship. It’s a weird meta-meditation on celebrity and career arcs and the strange fact that despite the intense ambient loneliness, they all belong to a “cohort”. It’s a small clutch of people, a tiny tight incestuous knot of folks who’ve made it, sort of, and who grok the journey they’ve all been on without being able to discuss it or just a grab a coffee. They give each other crabs and crap and call to say “fuck you, or sorry.”  Everything that’s wrong is everyone’s fault, probably, but the point is something else. It’s appearing together on the Retro Comedy Hour. Deeper than friendship, that is.

I loved that scene for its raw autobiographical frankness. Louis CK is never not generous when it comes to narrating his own experience: he’s talked openly about what it was like to watch the money come in from his Live at the Beacon Theater experiment. He’s described the high, and talked about what amount of money struck him as enough, and about how he knows this victory streak he’s on is going to end. This scene speaks to what it must be like to feel simultaneously like you’ve made it, but you’re also always already all washed up. You’ve left some important things behind. And even as you experience this epiphany, this life-changing revelation of loss and malfeasance, it turns out that you’ve already done it all. You’ve remembered that very loss, and your role in it, and apologized, but the pace of your own success has erased the entire human arc of anger and reconciliation from your memory, that’s how fucked up success has made you. And now you owe another apology that’s impossible to offer, just as Dolores “owes” you a blow job that it’s impossible to collect.

We’ve talked here about the ways in which Louie isn’t Louis CK, but I feel like one of the main pleasures Louie offers is indistinguishable from the pleasure of reading creative nonfiction. Yes, I find myself thinking, that’s exactly what it would be like.

So, let’s talk about Dad.

We start with two incidents, both equally uncanny. The first is the spectacle of tiny, headstrong, demanding, firecracker Jane playing a violin with real skill and unsuspected depths of feeling. The second is Louie’s first moment as a less-than-ideal dad, in which he shuts down this moving performance (from a character we’ve rarely seen so open, so engaged) with an anger that’s barely controlled. “This is bullshit,” he mutters after sending her to her room.

It’s bizarre. It’s as weird for us as viewers as it is for Louie when his car window spontaneously shatters in front of his father’s house. Louie as an angry, hurtful dad? We’re unmoored, we’re in the uncanny valley. There’s no standup afterwards to lighten the mood or explain (via a joke about how parents sometimes just lose it and treat their kids like crap and how that’s when you realize what a shithead you are and always have been and take steps: apologize, or buy your kid a pony, or sit in your room and picture dying alone, wondering what in the world to do to make any of it better) what that scene was all about. Like Louie’s dad-rash, this is an episode in which nothing gets narrated or processed. It’s Never in the tub: a huge flood of diarrhea while the person inside says, “Talk about what?”

So it’s an episode about bad fatherhood. It’s also an episode in which Louie is actually—but actually—going slightly insane. It’s as if, in addition to the crabs he caught from Maria Bamford, he also caught a case of the crazies from Parker Posey.

What did you guys make of the uncanny elements? Are they all registers of Louie’s loosening grip on reality when faced with the prospect of seeing his father? There’s the guy on the security tape who wasn’t Louie but who the manager and security guard insisted was, and they were right. That’s the first case of something odd happening in Louie’s own perception (which we share), and it’s no coincidence that it happens after he gets off the phone with Uncle Excalibur (!!!). I enjoyed the escalating sequence of surrealism. The airplane pilot’s voice was standard Louie fare. The fight with the GPS system was another half-step up, but it was acceptable. Louie often generates Jiminy Crickets on the show; externalized figures that voice his conscience. But the car window shattering spontaneously was a full octave higher. I loved that moment, but it felt like it committed us to a reading of Louie where he’s no longer in control of his daydreams. He’s actually starting hallucinate.

I hated the runaway scene. I don’t know what do with the amount of weirdness in the last three episodes. What I’m wondering is whether Louie’s insanity within this episode is specific to “Dad,” or whether it’s the climax of a larger arc that we might be missing. Why do all the moms at the school—who all seem to be deeply damaged—only trust and confide in him? Why do all women ask him to do completely bizarre things? Is this just his experience of the moms in Pamela’s absence? Is he perceiving them as weirder than they are because they’re so profoundly not-Pamela?

The real question, I guess, is how is it possible that everything that happens to Louie is deeply, deeply odd? At some point we have to wonder whether it’s the world or him, whether he might be a lunatic protagonist whose lunacy we’ve been missing.

That’s an unlikely reading, and I know it, but it’s one of the few I can think of that totally absolves Louie from the “and then he woke up” cliche of bad workshop fiction. There’s a fine line to walk when charting a dreamlike subjectivity that isn’t actually a dream, and up until that last sequence in “Dad”, I think Louis CK was pulling it off. But that end—the run, the motorcycle theft, stealing a boat, leaving the rental car—it all struck me as a bridge too far. It seemed too dreamlike, too broad.

Another corollary of the “Louie’s losing it” reading is that the show actually has some narrative continuity in spite of us all. It’s showing us a man’s gradual breakdown, and that’s interesting. Again: I’m not persuaded that this reading is 100% right, but I’m curious to hear what you all made of the last few episodes.

On the subject of continuity, we’ve talked a fair amount here at Dear Television about how Louie’s fatherhood is never in question, and it’s worth noting in that connection that the daughters are split in the last few episodes. (This is Jane’s episode alone with Dad, just as Lily’s was “Barney/Never.”) Recall that in the previous episode, both girls rejected piano lessons. I mention this not to point out a failure in continuity but rather to highlight a targeted discontinuity: highlighting her musicianship seems to me to specifically contradict (but in a dream-like way, swapping violin for piano) the world his daughters inhabited in the previous episode. The ungrateful child who didn’t take advantage of the opportunity afforded her becomes, in this episode, the child who does nothing but.

I don’t know what to make of that, but it’s definitely the case that we’re losing the show’s anchors: the opening sequence vanishes in “Barney/Never,” Jane and Lily are showing up apart instead of together, the explanatory standup has fallen by the wayside, and Louie’s sitting alone on a stolen boat. What’s going on?

Cover up so as not to catch my wretchedness,

Lili

First of all, I’d like to say that—with the exception of Jane’s outrageous suggestion that Parker Posey is somehow not hot—I’ve been thrilled, diverted, and delighted by everything that’s gone on on our blog here since I’ve been on temporary hiatus.  That said, I’ve had a bit of a hard time figuring out how to jump back into the fray.  My initial idea was that I might write a kind of early-middle review of Louie’s new season, taking note of the things I’ve noticed hurriedly watching, without writing about, the season so far.  Issues that would have come up in this post might have included: C.K.’s desire, to which he testified on The Daily Show, to “draw attention to” issues like sexual violence paired with what I see as C.K.’s own wonky thinking on such issues; the increasing incidence (particularly in the Miami episode) of C.K.’s stand-up being not-quite-as-good-as the show of which it is a part; the undercutting, in the final stand-up clip of the Miami episode, of the complex, inarticulate portrayal of male friendship by suggesting that the episode could be boiled down to gay panic; how awesome Louie’s kids are on the show, and how much weight they carry even when they are absent from an episode.  I fully intended to write all of this stuff. And then Parker Posey came on the show.

It’s a cliché to call a performance electrifying.  It’s also a cliché to call a performance devastating or earth-shattering.  What all of those clichés have in common, though, and what they have been invented to describe is a kind of performance that fundamentally alters the character of the work in which it appears.  The screen is different when this actor is in view, its basic assumptions and conventions are put into question.  The scope and composition of the work must expand, alter, accommodate in order to feature this performance. Plenty of folks have filled plenty of internet space extolling the many many many virtues of Parker Posey’s electrifying/devastating/earth-shattering performance from these past two episodes. On Vulture this week, Matt Zoller Seitz wrote one of the best short critical appreciations I’ve ever seen about anything, Sady Doyle has a great topical analysis of the second part in relation to the “manic pixie dream girl” phenomenon and the film Ruby Sparks, and Annie Clark (St. Vincent), voicing, as usual, the voice of the people, tweeted that Parker Posey should be awarded an Olympic medal for her two episode-arc. What all of these responses point to is the idea that, not only is Posey’s character Liz something new to the Louieverse, but that Liz is something almost unable to be contained by the brilliantly-drawn but familiar circles of compromised intimacy, humiliation, and self-loathing in which Louie exists.

Fittingly, then, Posey’s appearance is also the occasion for Louie’s first real experiment in serial form: the two-part episode.  Louie must adapt formally to the presence of this performance.  Louie, as we all know, is allergic to seriality.  One of the many virtues of this program is its staunch formal adherence to the self-contained episode along with its unconventional and often idiosyncratic management of traditional sitcom beats.  As is often noted, Louie is more a series of short films or vignettes featuring the same protagonist than it is a narrative program.  This constraint forces C.K., like a conceptual poet, to be constantly mindful of the conventions and constructions of the “sitcom” that might otherwise provide a creative crutch.  Viewers cannot be compelled simply by a desire to learn the outcome of a plotline a la Ross-and-Rachel.  This, paired with C.K.’s penchant for one-off guest stars and this season’s disregard for even the demands of continuity, frees Louie of the need to service characters or story-arcs. Even the elements of the series that seem to most approximate a serial narrative—Louie’s unrequited love for Pamela Adlon or even the gradual, almost imperceptible evolution of his stand-up career—feel more like looming presences than weekly dramas.  Louie’s yearning for Pamela only seemed like a plotline because that yearning had an object.  But, functionally, it would be equivalent to saying that Louie’s fear of death or sexual mortification is a story the series is telling.  Louie trafficks in meditations, not stories. This is not to say that Louie has transcended the need for serial narrative or that C.K. is some kind of visionary.  The form is unfamiliar to TV, and C.K. is extraordinarily good at his work, but he did not invent these forms.  Instead, it’s just to say that, by not really caring that much about story, C.K. is free to create a much more ambivalent, messy, and freely-associative show.

In this light, I think it’s more accurate to think of “Daddy’s Girlfriend (Parts I and II)” as a double album than an honest-to-goodness serialized narrative.  If every episode of Louie is about examining a concept rather than telling a part of a story, then this particular conceptual unit needed more than 30 minutes just as Blonde on Blonde or Bitches’ Brew required more than the length of an LP to do what they set out to do.  Usually, on Louie, the goldfish grows relative to the size of the bowl. In this situation, with this particular goldfish, Louis C.K. just needed to get a bigger bowl.

And I think there are two things that made this goldfish bigger than usual: the concept of reciprocal honesty and the actual collaboration between C.K. and Posey.  Louie, not unlike Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm, often gets into scrapes because he insists on being honest about his feelings, even if he’s not terribly careful or self-aware about them.  This was certainly true of the Dane Cook episode.  More often, though, Louie gets into scrapes because he is rendered inarticulate, shocked silent, by the honesty of others.  This was most notable in this season’s early sequence in which Louie is dumped at the diner.  Spurring from a misunderstanding, Louie is literally unable to respond once the soon-to-be ex-girlfriend starts spontaneously truth-telling about their relationship.  This kind of bumbling passivity is one of the things C.K. is best at portraying, but, over three seasons, it’s become almost reflexive, a little too easy to explode a situation by having somebody with the ammunition to do so tell Louie off.  Louie is often humiliated, he’s often brought low, he’s often made to feel cheap.

So a lot of people—especially women­—are brought onto this show to call Louie on his shit.  But rarely has this been done so lovingly, so magnetically as it was done by Posey’s Liz.  To some extent, I think we can look to last season’s Joan Rivers episode as a kind of early version of this interaction. Rivers was rough with Louie, but she treated him with an almost loving concern, a seriousness, that was so foreign to Louie he responded physically.  I think the same is true here.  Liz takes Louie seriously.  She, like we do, understands him as a redeemable person, and she seeks to teach him, to request from him, an honesty that he is ordinarily unable to muster. She demands, in other words, that he participate in a relationship rather than silently watching it self-destruct.

And while Louie remains silent for much of the second part of “Daddy’s Girlfriend” and most of the lines he utters are lines of complaint, frustration, or even genuine anger, they are true, and they are expressed in a way that is uncommon.  Almost every critical appreciation of this series notes that one of its great aspects is that, through the ugliness and awkwardness of its vignettes, Louie showcases the beauty and goodness and possibility of human existence.  Louie is an anti-social mess, but when we as the viewers can detect what’s good in him, we can see what’s good about the world.  It’s the duckling in the pocket or the crippling unwillingness to presume anything about his relationship with Pamela.  Isn’t there something lovable even here?

What’s exceptional about “Daddy’s Girlfriend,” I think, and what makes Louie offer that smile at the end of the episode, is that Liz makes Louie see himself the way we see him.  She calls him on his shit, but she stays.  She recaps his adventures—You’ve tried on a dress! You’ve saved a man’s life!—the way a viewer would. She provokes and then shows him his own courage.  The moment passes at the end—in part because Liz has reached a limit point with her own honesty—but it happens. And, though it seems that she won’t be back this season, this date seems more like a beginning than a typical catastrophic denouement.  If the ordinary thesis of Louie is that Louie can’t have nice things, C.K. has taken the space here to show what it takes to earn, to reciprocate, and to acknowledge something truly, if complicatedly, good.

Which brings us to my second point. That is, the episode has taken the form it’s taken, in part, because it had to expand to fit the size of Posey’s performance. But it’s not just her.  I agree that she should win every Emmy for her turn here, but what I think is really on display in the episode is the collaboration between Posey and C.K. Seitz points out that this is Posey’s best work, but I think it also might be Louis C.K.’s.  Posey’s episode-length monologue is so engaging because of the way she turns her eyes on and off, the way she lunges through space like an Olympic fencer, even the way her voice modulates when she lies, but it’s also so engaging because it’s written so well.  Louis C.K. is one of the best writers working in television, but the occasion of Liz has forced him to do things we’ve never seen. We’ve heard hilarious takedowns and witnessed great comic set-pieces, but we haven’t heard wit this sharp and fast and easy. “All of a sudden, my body’s accepting nutrients and within a month, I’m a healthy 15-year-old girl with a cool punky haircut.”  I’m not saying we haven’t seen Louis C.K. write with wit and fluency, but we haven’t heard this voice before.

In other words, I think the insane quality and explosiveness of Posey’s performance and the almost unbelievably good writing C.K. has done are the occasion for the length of this episode.  The relationship is so strong because the creative process that is visible in this episode is so strong in its own right.  This is, in some sense, an episode about collaboration by an artist justly famous for his auteurism—though the editing that makes this episode’s sparkling rhythms so infectious is the product of C.K.’s newfound collaboration with Susan Morse.  It’s about the joys and terrors of following someone else’s lead, and it’s also about the limits of that kind of collaboration. Louie does not step to the edge, ultimately.  But he almost doesn’t need to.  Louie already has.
Love,

Phil.

Let’s start at the very beginning with the title: “Daddy’s Girlfriend, Part 1.” This is, speaking of formal surprises, Louie’s first two-part episode yet. CK has seemingly taken so many swerves with his show that now seriality—perhaps the defining convention of televisual narrative—now feels erratic, even devious. As other writers have suggested, good things cannot be waiting for Louie in Part 2. This is perhaps a prejudice, but, wait, I’m getting ahead of myself–

“Daddy’s Girlfriend, Part 1.” The title speaks with the subject as and from the perspective of the daughters, but the entire episode is still, as usual, seen from the eyes of Louie (this might be the most consistent aspect of the show). Though Louie’s status as a dad (and a single one at that) is firmly tied up with his self-identity throughout the series, this does not preclude his myopia and, oftentimes, selfishness as a single man.

Early on in the episode, stand-up Louie riffs on the term “prejudice,” which his daughters have asked him to define. Dad stumbles. Prejudice as a general phenomenon is, as Louie explains, exactly what the word says: “You judge before. Pre-ju-dice.” (After reading Litvak’s The Un-Americans this week, the homonymic pun between Louie’s emphatic pre-ju-dice and pre-jew-dice seems almost too convenient. But don’t judge me on that.) Prejudices, as markers of individual personalities, however, are more difficult to define—touchy in their simultaneous predictability and ability to shock. Louie, so articulate on stage, mocks his then-mumbled attempt to explain prejudice.

He goes on to assert with confidence that he “just knows” Scarlett Johansson would be terrific in bed, though his riff ends with this acknowledgment: “I still jerk off to that wedding album I found in the garbage.” Is it easier to be committed to your prejudices, or prejudiced toward commitments?

Rewind. Back to the title. “Daddy’s Girlfriend, Part 1” implies a commitment to narrative continuity. Girlfriends, too, imply a status of romantic commitment. (You don’t have to marry them, though you might.) Over diner food, Lilly tells Louie about “mom’s friend, Patrick” who is “pretty funny.” What underlies this comment is that Louie used to be mom’s “friend”; Louie is pretty funny. The daughters go on to ask Louie when is he going to get a girlfriend. The look of dismay on dad’s face is palpable. This episode is as much about “Daddy’s Girlfriend” as it is about “Daddy’s Girls.” Throughout the episode, you wonder if Louie goes to seek a girlfriend because of his daughters, or for himself.

We’ve seen Louie—as single dad—navigate the corridors of hook-up culture aplenty. Many episodes centre around him having sex with women who then never appear again in the show itself, though they likely do in Louie’s life, however sporadically. (The final joke of episode 2 this season was Louie agreeing to see Laurie again—and I little wonder that he does, from time to time.) Even this episode shows Louie trying to stretch a booty-call situation into girlfriend material. His “hanging out” with Maria Bamford means meeting on the corner of a sidewalk, going to her apartment, and promptly having sex. After sex, Bamford and Louie lie on the bed watching reality television, which already points to the lack of connection between the two (the physical connection is apparently just as shoddy). Determined, though, Louie (likely inspired by the idea that Bamford could be, for his daughters, the female counterpart to ex-wife’s funny friend Patrick) asks Bamford to come over and have dinner with his daughters. She immediately senses where this is going, and with a scrunched-up face, stresses that booty calls should not come with “added features.” As her metaphor “now I’m all dicked up in the head” suggests, certain dick encounters start down there (“I’ll blow you so you’ll get hard again”) and certainly should stay there.

Against all prior hook-ups where Louie essentially drops his role as decent male (aka decent dad), this one with Bamford offers a difference: he’s trying to link his sex life up with his family one. A favourite episode of mine, “Bully” from Season 1, shows Louie on a date rather than a booty-call; with a potential girlfriend, we see Louie then take into consideration his daughters and prioritizing—even articulating—his responsibilities as a dad.

“Daddy’s Girlfriend, Part 1.” There is something almost gruesome in the title–a joke on modern relationships in liberal culture generally. Dads don’t live with moms. Moms have friends. Dads have girlfriends. Marriage albums end up in the trash. Dad masturbates to them. Dropping Lilly off at school, Louie entertains fantasies of taking a teacher (how convenient!) as girlfriend for him and his daughters.

As he cruises classrooms from the hallway, a soundtrack (somewhere between doo-wop and bossa nova) kicks in as the camera pans slowly over the long skirts, tights, and pony tails of smiling schoolteachers. The combination of slow motion and bubbling ballad emphasizes their conservative dress as to almost attenuate, and so summarily extinguish, the allure behind sexy schoolteacher tropes. Indeed, if Louie is seeking a girlfriend, then he’s looking for a relationship that goes beyond one hallucinatory bout of soft-focus sex on a school-desk. The soundtrack primes us for a sexual encounter, but it’s not the kind that expands into girlfriendship. While one teacher shuts a door in Louie’s face (which also abruptly shuts down the music), another quickly loses girlfriend potential when Louie spots the engagement ring on her finger. Marriage isn’t sexy. Someone else’s romantic beginning marks sexual foreclosure for Louie. Only the dregs of broken vows offer erotic promise.

Louie’s male gaze (helped by camera and soundtrack) is pronounced exactly so the audience can get some distance on these scenes of obvious objectification. This form of prejudice can be dangerous. The third and final teacher Louie cruises is gesticulating at the children. Her arms make wide movements. She seems nice. She seems funny. But as the camera emphasizes, funny women come with stereotyped costs: this teacher is heaver than the others. Following this, Louie images a scenario where she’ll want sex from behind. *Cue: stop music.* Her body speaks a kind of logic about how she wants her body to be handled. That, indeed, is some shitty prejudice. And the fact that we as viewers understand it (even if in a mocked form) is shitty in itself.

This is, as Evan as previously stated, how the structure of Louie works. CK sets us up for a kind of narrative logic that then gets turned. And what makes the show so funny and surprising is how viewers recognize that they were primed for narrative to turn another way. If Louie’s endings (or in this case, his Part Twos) intercept our first impressions, how do we make of our ability to move on—or to move with—where these conclusions take us?

At a bookstore, a version of sexy schoolteacher is presented through a bookstore clerk (played by Parker Posey). The same ballad starts when Louie spots her, except this time the camera doesn’t focus on Posey–it focuses on Louie. He inches toward her, his awkward body taking the initiative to come beside hers, rather than using filmic close-ups to get hers right before his eyes. The song is interrupted once by her male colleague—“Can I help you?”—but it starts again, as though this narrative could have a redo, or doesn’t necessarily need to go without a stutter.

Posey isn’t hot, she’s “h-horribly cute,” as Louie tells her later. She wears glasses, which she takes on and off during Louie’s various interactions with her. He doesn’t ask her out on a date during their first encounter. Instead, he repeatedly returns to the bookstore, and they, in a sense, get to know one another. She, additionally, gets to learn more about Louie’s daughters. Posey loves the children’s section. Maybe these added features are actually that–features. Her initial recommendation of a funny book doesn’t work for Jane, but she does seem to understand the power of novels to take budding female anxieties out for “a safe kind of spin.”

Like the reality show that appears as something of a meta-text throughout this episode, the novel is a site of safe projection. As the credits roll, the reality show returns as a kind of mediation and meditation between Part 1 and Part 2 (the final lines holds its speaker in suspense: “I just want to go home”). Like real reality shows—and like Louie—this made-up one follows the rhythm of alternating between people who speak to the television, commenting on their actions/character (engaging the audience much like stand-up Louie does), and then the actual scenarios where character gets played out.

That the reality show mirrors the form of Louie begins to beg the question: what is the genre of Louie? Does it have a start or a finish? Does it have endless starts? Are there parts that add up to a whole? Or is everything just a part? Is Louie autobiographical in the way that all reality television is based on an ability to “cheat” the real? Or is it as transparently artificial and predictable as this fake reality television show emphasizes? Are we to judge it—even pre-judge it—by a supposed genre? Or do we wait for it to surprise us?

Louie is wrong about expecting a “no” from Posey when he asks her out. Even if he harbours an obscene amount of visual prejudice against women, Louie uses his charming brand of vulnerable stuttering to talk Posey into a date by preemtively talking her out of her prejudice. Posey, though, counters his prejudice against her; she doesn’t “choose guys based on looks” and agrees (“of course!”) on a date. This disequilibrium between them is what suggests to me that Part 2 might be the last segment for these two.

Fist pump,
Jane