Nor is the show’s uniqueness simply the result of C.K. asserting creative control. Television history is filled with sitcoms driven by stand-up comics who had a vision (or thought they did); without exception, they all chose a format and tone and more or less stuck with them for the duration. The Bob Newhart Show, The Cosby Show, and Everybody Loves Raymond, to name three influential sitcoms fronted by stand-ups, were pretty much the same at the end of their runs as they were at the start. Others, such as Roseanne and Seinfeld, evolved but never lost touch with their essence. Louie morphed from week to week, episode to episode, sometimes minute to minute. In doing so, it translated the thought processes of stand-up comedy into cinematic terms, and in a way that that was new to commercial television.
Most episodes would start with Louie performing onstage (just like most episodes of Seinfeld) and then segue into the narrative, with fictional characters speaking scripted lines. But if you go back and rewatch any episode through the lens of cinematic stand-up, you realize that even when Louie moves out of the nightclub, you’re still watching stand-up. The segmented nature of the series evokes the stop-and-start rhythms of a stand-up routine, an art form in which it’s acceptable to lurch from one subject to the next with a blunt transition: “Women.” “Football fans are the worst.” “Now I’m gonna talk about things that you can do to keep people on their toes.” C.K. was always talking to you directly, in the way that a stand-up comic would address the audience from the stage, but he was doing it through the language of film.
The results were hit-and-miss, just as stand-up routines are hit-and-miss, because at heart, the whole show was an extended riff. Sometimes he was reflecting on ethics or politics or teaching a moral lesson. Sometimes he was telling you about a dream or fantasy he had, or an encounter that became fodder for a fantasy: see season 2’s “Subway,” a short piece that starts with Louie encountering a homeless man washing himself on a subway platform and ends with Louie fantasizing about becoming a hero to fellow riders by doffing his shirt to mop up a spill on a seat. Other times C.K. was mining experiences from his life (or experiences that happened to his friends—especially his occasional cowriter, Pamela Adlon). An example is season 2’s “Pamela,” wherein Louie made a heartrending confession of love to his female friend Pamela (Adlon) and was gently rebuffed. “Pamela” was contained in the same half hour as “Subway,” and it worked, because stand-up routines pivot from descriptions of dreams to accounts of romantic disaster all the time without inducing imaginative whiplash.
Similarly extreme juxtapositions happened over the course of seasons. Season 3 began with a series of personal, professional, and sexual humiliations for Louie—some ridiculous, as when Louie’s car gets gratuitously destroyed, and others wry and “realistic,” as in the episode where Louis develops a man crush on a hotel employee in Miami—and then built to a surprisingly intense dramatic peak in episodes 4 and 5, which starred Parker Posey as a dark free spirit who forced Louie to confront his depression and suicidal urges. Soon after, Louie aired a segment in which the hero babysat a brat who ate only raw meat, pushed baby carriages into traffic, tossed rugs through apartment windows, and voided his bowels in Louie’s bathtub. Neither the boy nor his loathsome mother were “realistic”; they were the sorts of absurd caricatures who might appear in a routine by a comic who had just been through a rotten experience and was using hyperbole to vent.
Yet this segment—as well as the subsequent “Dad,” which climaxed with Louie racing through Boston on foot and on a stolen motorcycle and speedboat—existed within the same fictional framework, one in which anything was possible. The show’s most daring episode, the season 3 finale, “New Year’s Eve,” unreeled like a dream that might or might not have become another dream that might or might not have included the death of Posey’s character. It ended with Louie impulsively getting on a plane to China, meandering through a city and a village, and being taken in by a rural family, who seem to have a lively conversation with him over dinner even though he was speaking English and they were speaking Mandarin. (“New Year’s Eve” owes so much to late-period David Lynch films like Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire that when Lynch appeared in season 3 as a TV executive mentoring Louie in his bid to take over for David Letterman, his presence felt redundant.)
To find an equivalent to what Louie did with the sitcom format, you have look at what another former stand-up turned auteur, Woody Allen, did in theatrical cinema between 1969’s Take the Money and Run and 1984’s Broadway Danny Rose. These films mixed straightforward comedy and drama, voice-over, direct address, documentary devices, fantasies and nightmares with relaxed precision. C.K. clearly learned a lot from watching Allen’s films, and seemed to acknowledge the lineage by using jazz in his sound tracks and hiring Allen’s regular editor, Susan E. Morse, to work on season 3. (He cut her loose immediately, though, and went back to editing the series himself.) Allen seemed to recognize C.K. as a kindred spirit when he cast him as a supporting player in 2013’s Blue Jasmine. Despite all this, Louie never feels purely imitative of Allen or anyone else, because its tone, style, and emotional temperature swing as widely from week to week as Allen’s did from year to year.
The freedom of which C.K. avails himself could be construed as a cop-out. If a series has no set mode and no established baseline of “reality,” it becomes harder to complain that, say, Louis C.K. is painting himself as too much of a sad sack to gain sympathy, or that some of the portrayals of female sexuality have a touch of bitter-white-guy misogyny (an episode near the end of season 4 made it seem as if Louie were on the verge of raping Pamela, then had her fall in love with him—but did either thing actually “happen”?). The easiest response to these concerns would be to say that every moment of every segment is happening inside Louie’s mind. But that would raise the question of whether Louie would be a greater achievement if it weren’t such a grab bag—if the creator decided to stick with one mode or tone for a bit longer, and develop his character and other characters more meticulously, instead of jumping to another thing as a stand-up comic might, or introducing biographical touches that don’t make a lot of real-world sense (such as giving his alter ego two blond, Nordic-pale daughters, but an African American mother).
But C.K. never seemed interested in giving audiences the show they wanted, only in making the show that he wanted. More often than not, his show came off confident rather than arrogant, perhaps because the lead character was so often humbled, even humiliated, by life. This, ironically, could be the only area in which the issue of believability might apply to Louie: No one brash enough to make a show like this could be entirely credible as a man who’s muddling through life.
—MZS
The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–1977) Total score: 98
In the early 1970s, Ethel Winant, CBS’s vice president of talent and casting, had to place her high heels outside the restroom to alert men that the room was occupied, because there was no ladies’ room and no lock on the door. Winant was in exactly the right environment for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a series about a single woman trying to make it in the male-dominated TV industry, and maybe find love in the process, on her own terms, and on her own timetable. She protected The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a gentle sitcom from executive producer James L. Brooks that became one of the most culturally important series of the 1970s.
Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore, still beloved for her success on The Dick Van Dyke Show) and her sidekick, Rhoda Morgenstern (Valerie Harper), stood in for all the changes affecting US women in the Me Decade, but what was happening behind the scenes was just as important. Under Brooks, The Mary Tyler Moore Show became the first major network series to hire women writers and directors and entrust them with ongoing responsibilities. Their perspective was reflected in the weekly stories about Mary, an office drone at a TV station who worked her way up to producer under station manager Lou Grant (Ed Asner) while dating and breaking up with various men, some fascinating and others rather trivial, without
ever having to tacitly apologize to viewers for not having gotten married and squeezed out children before her thirtieth birthday.
The show’s opening credits summed up the show’s laid-back sense of empowerment: a series of images showing Mary going about the streets of Minneapolis, the show’s hometown, while a man sang about how she could turn the world on with her smile and was gonna make it after all, capped by a triumphant freeze-frame of Mary tossing her knit winter cap into the air. There were no hostage episodes, no sudden pregnancies, nothing too dark; everything that happened in the workplace felt real, right down to the battles over propriety in said workplace. (Blustering newsman Ted Baxter, played by Ted Knight, pinched a woman’s backside in an elevator, only to discover to his horror that it belonged to his newly hired station manager.) When the series did go “big,” it was in the service of comedy, first and foremost—never more so than in the beloved episode about the death of children’s performer Chuckles the Clown, who was crushed to death by an elephant at the circus while wearing a peanut costume. A bit of the minister’s eulogy inadvertently describes the magic of The Mary Tyler Moore Show: “Chuckles the Clown brought pleasure to millions. The characters he created will be remembered by children and adults alike: Peter Peanut, Mr. Fee-Fi-Fo, Billy Banana, and my particular favorite, Aunt Yoo Hoo. And not just for the laughter that they provided—there was always some deeper meaning to whatever Chuckles did.”
The show fought an uphill battle against its own network. Brooks and Allan Burns originally pitched Mary as a divorcée, but the network’s research department insisted that would be an instant show-killer. So Brooks and Burns had audiences meet Mary as she was getting out of a long relationship with a man she’d supported through medical school. The show’s other characters were not so conciliatory toward TV’s milquetoast norms: Lou Grant is a hard drinker who gets divorced; Rhoda Morgenstern is an abrasive New Yorker, and exuberantly Jewish. As the show wore on, other taboos fell, often so casually that nobody seemed to notice, much less get worked up about them. Mary had lived with her former boyfriend, in the same apartment (i.e., “in sin”), and in the later years of the show it was revealed (in a casual bit of dialogue) that she was on birth control. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was one of the first network series to refer to a gay character as gay, and to insist, week in and week out, that one’s real family consists of the people you choose to be around, not necessarily the ones related by blood.
“I just wanted you to know, that sometimes I get concerned about being a career woman,” Mary says in the 1977 finale. “I get to thinking my job is too important to me. And I tell myself that the people I work with are just the people I work with, and not my family. And last night I thought, ‘What is a family anyway?’ They’re just people who make you feel less alone and really loved. And that’s what you’ve done for me. Thank you for being my family.”
—MZS
The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002) Total score: 97
“We work in the dark,” narrates FBI agent Fox Mulder, the questing hero of The X-Files, in a season 3 episode about a man who claims to be possessed by the spirit of a gargoyle. “We do what we can to battle the evil that would otherwise destroy us. But if a man’s character is fate, this fight is not a choice but a calling. And sometimes the weight of this burden causes us to falter, breaching the fragile fortress of our mind, allowing the monsters without to turn within, and we are left alone staring into the abyss. Into the laughing face of madness.”
The reverent momentousness of Mulder’s words, perched as always on the edge of parody, is the essence of The X-Files. Part paranoid thriller, part The Twilight Zone–or The Outer Limits–style anthology, part platonic romance (between Mulder, played by David Duchovny, and his partner, Gillian Anderson’s agent Dana Scully), Chris Carter’s series was kidding and serious, manipulative and naive, touchingly straightforward and hopelessly overstuffed, often in the same week. It split the difference between serialized and anthologized storytelling, alternating grim and despairing chapters in an ongoing “mythology” and so-called Monster of the Week episodes. But its most significant achievement is historical. The X-Files’ versatile format bridged the gap between the conservatism of broadcast TV and the creative restlessness of cable in the 1990s, at the same time that its subject matter channeled the political and cultural chaos of the ’90s, putting the darkest undercurrents in US life under the show’s warped microscope and scrutinizing it.
The X-Files debuted on Fox in the fall of 1993, less than two years after Oliver Stone’s hit potboiler JFK, which collected major conspiracy theories in a single narrative, and six months after the first World Trade Center bombing; it ended its run in May 2002, eight months after the second World Trade Center attack, which spawned more conspiracy narratives than any catastrophe since Kennedy. Its nine-season run overlapped all manner of paranoia-inducing events, including the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City (an event that was knowingly referenced in the 1998 film The X-Files: Fight the Future, in the bombing of a federal building in—of all places—Dallas). Throughout, there were moments when Carter’s series felt like a conduit for fringe fantasies and nightmares of the culture that surrounded it—a culture that was increasingly intertwined with the Internet. By the late ’90s, it was plausible for computer users to spend a few hours in an X-Files-centric chat room and then hop over to another one dedicated to arguing how many shots were fired at Dealey Plaza and whether this bombing or that terrorist attack was “really” carried out by the parties who’d been blamed for them, or if they were “false flag” operations that served the interests of a government or business cabal whose tentacles reached across the globe and back through time, and that might’ve included the Illuminati or the Masons.
Fox “Spooky” Mulder, who worked in a marginalized (and in the real world, nonexistent) department of the FBI, became the patron saint of conspiracy theorists, not just because he was played by a handsome but self-deprecatingly funny actor but because nearly every hunch Mulder played while unraveling the show’s fantastically complex, borderline nonsensical conspiracy—the “mythology”—about Roswell and alien invasions and DNA and black oil and bees seemed right, even though Mulder and his allies couldn’t prove it. The audience knew, or felt, that he was on to something, even when the powers that be buried incriminating details, or contrived to prevent him from seeing the bigger picture. Mulder’s science-minded, proof-demanding partner, Scully, was initially presented as a foil, and a lot of early episodes ended on a tantalizingly inconclusive note. But after a few seasons even Scully had no choice but to get on board with Mulder’s theorizing, and her insistence on evidence and explanations became a means of strengthening Mulder’s claims rather than shooting them down. Mulder and Scully were sometimes aided by the Lone Gunmen (Bruce Harwood’s John Fitzgerald Byers, Tom Braidwood’s Melvin Frohike, and Dean Haglund’s Richard “Ringo” Langly), Internet-savvy characters who played like fantasy identification figures aimed at fans who dreamed of helping the heroes.
If The X-Files had concentrated on Scully and Mulder’s attempts to unravel the conspiracy, the series wouldn’t have become the longest continuously running science-fiction drama in the history of US broadcast TV. Instead, the über-plot grew more tangled by the season, and the conspiracy episodes were brutal and despairing—the ’90s fantasy version of ’70s downer thrillers like The Conversation, Chinatown, and The Parallax View, tales in which it was never possible to know the whole story. Over nine seasons, Mulder’s famous poster “The Truth Is Out There” seemed less hopeful than fatalistic.
But Carter and his fellow writer-producers alternated these episodes with self-contained “Monster of the Week” stories. These owed more to The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Tales from the Crypt, and were showcases for gruesome makeup, puppetry, and now-crude-looking digital effects, and for Mulder and Scully’s banter, which encompassed aspects of a sibling rivalry, platonic friendship, and will-they-or-won’t-th
ey flirtation. Over the years, the agents investigated a murderous computer (“Ghost in the Machine”), an arctic worm (“Ice”), a set of genetically identical girls developed as supersoldiers by the military (“Eve”), a pyrokinetic who made British politicians catch on fire (“Fire”), were-creatures (“Shapes,” “Alpha,” “Chimera”), vampires (“3”), a jaguar spirit (“Teso Dos Bichos”), a giant alligator called Big Blue (“Quagmire”), a sewer-dwelling “Flukeman” played by regular X-Files writer Darin Morgan (“The Host”), a car mechanic who could control lightning (“D.P.O.”), a mutant emergency medical technician who could regenerate his body parts (“Leonard Betts”), an assassin who could will people into killing themselves (“Pusher,” “Kitsunegari”), a shape-shifter—played by Morgan again—who fathered several children with vestigial tails (“Small Potatoes”), a soul-eater (“The Gift”), and an extraterrestrial who became an exceptional Negro League ballplayer (“The Unnatural”), to name just a few. There were also encounters with what could be described as human monsters: serial killers, mostly, but also people victimized by ways of life. The most notorious of these is the family from “Home,” a clan of inbred, deformed hillbillies so revolting that the episode was shown only once during its regular run and yanked from syndication after viewer complaints.
The X-Files was arguably at its best in these one-offs, which tended to be light in tone and cleanly plotted. They were often slyly sexy, too, thanks to Duchovny and Anderson’s charged banter, and laugh-out-loud funny. The episodes written by Darin Morgan often had a satirical and self-aware vibe; the best was season 3’s “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” starring Peter Boyle as a man cursed to foretell the time and place of people’s deaths. “You know, there are worse ways to go, but I can’t think of a more undignified way than autoerotic asphyxiation,” he blurts out during a car ride with the agents. “Why are you telling me that?” Mulder asks.
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