I Like to Watch

July 30, 2006 | July is almost over, and once again I don't feel as if I've fully exploited its July-ness the way I should've. Isn't July supposed to be filled with fireworks and picnics and watermelon and trips to the beach? Shouldn't everyone be tanned and well rested, with a frozen daiquiri or a chilled glass of sangria with a delightful fruit garnish in their hands at all times? I always have the feeling during July that there should be cookouts to attend constantly, and not the kind with messy bean salads and plates of burned sausages and bags of crumbly Doritos, either. No, we're talking festive, camera-ready cookouts, where everyone is wearing shades of dark red and purple that look good together, like in the pages of Martha Stewart Living, and the intelligent-looking yet stylish hosts serve huge, colorful fruit salads and big platters of beef, cooked to medium-rare perfection. All of the children are adorable but never shriek or pull the dog's ears, and at night there are sparklers and martinis and tiki torches and maybe a live violin quartet or a jazz band. People tell great jokes, no one talks about their dumb jobs, and there are no bugs, anywhere.

In other words, ideally, July is a cross between a Nestea plunge commercial and a spread in the summer issue of the Pottery Barn catalog. Sadly, though, that kind of art-directed July remains limited to magazines, fluffy summer TV shows and calendar photography, because the fact is -- and this is the part you forget when you're daydreaming about July in the middle of some particularly shivery, dreary day in January -- July is very, very hot. July is hot enough that no one has the energy to shower or comb their hair or even speak, let alone assemble delightful fruit garnishes. All anyone really does is slump on the couch in their underwear, sweating buckets.

Maybe in New England, in some small Norman Rockwell-style town, they achieve the sorts of idyllic July days that the rest of us dream about while we're tossing and turning at night, soaking the sheets. Maybe while we plant ourselves in front of the one, tiny air-conditioning unit in the house and refuse to budge, those adorable folks up in Maine are pickling beets and attending quaint little small-town parades. While the rest of us are driving to a crappy mall just to get out of the heat, those assholes are playing croquet while sampling a fresh batch of prosciutto-and-melon skewers.

But July is almost over, which is a big relief, since the month of August is clearly meant to be spent slumping on the couch in your underwear, sweating buckets. See, I imagine that I love the overachieving months the best, but really, I prefer the months with the lowest expectations attached to them: rainy February, sullen November, and soiled, stanky August.

Couch-free potatoes
In fact, overachievers in general, those Norman Rockwell types with their carefully restored California bungalows and their heirloom tomatoes and their ironed white linen shirts, really screw things up for the rest of us. We'd all be fine with big, lukewarm pitchers of lime Kool-Aid and a grass-covered Slippery Slide in the backyard, if not for all of their impeccable taste, which naturally trickles down to the shiny catalogs that arrive at our doors, catalogs we make the mistake of flipping through, impatiently, from the damp discomfort of our sweat-soaked couches.

This suspicion with the overachiever lifestyle is at the heart of HBO's summer sitcom "Lucky Louie" (10:30 p.m. Sundays on HBO), an alarmingly spare and brutal affair starring the comedian Louis C.K. and a gaggle of cranky types you don't normally see on TV.

Imagine if you were to take the Pottery Barn catalog and strip it of everything fake and impractical -- the enormous margarita glasses without a single spot on them, the hot pink napkins folded just so, the crystal-blue pool without leaves or dead bees floating in it, the slivers of watermelon so finely sliced that only a deeply troubled obsessive-compulsive could be responsible for them -- you'd be left with something resembling your actual life, except with shiny, new furniture where the old, beat-up furniture should go. "Lucky Louie" does the same thing for the modern sitcom. Not only did the creators of this show take out the average sitcom's bright purple walls and the bright orange couch with its rainbow of throw pillows, not only did they get rid of all adorable knickknacks and cool prints and subtract the cheerful open-plan kitchen and the big windows and the staircase that leads to the many bedrooms upstairs, but they had the audacity to stuff the main characters into a shabby-looking one-bedroom apartment.

And get this: There's no couch at all! The couch, that sitcom staple since "I Love Lucy," is gone. All Louie and his curmudgeonly wife and bratty 4-year-old daughter have is a small kitchen table, and a bed covered in the kind of tacky coverlet your grandmother used to knit for you out of lime green, sale-priced polyester-blend yarn.

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