Continue Reading...

Like the fairy-tale forest that turns out to be something more akin to a Hieronymous Bosch painting, Amy Schumer is far less virtuous than she appears. The comedian, whose series "Inside Amy Schumer" premieres on Comedy Central April 30, boasts one of the most subversive voices in comedy, imbuing riffs on porn, abortion and below-the-belt grooming (she refers to bikini waxing as “getting my vagina ready for its first quinceañera”) with a sly, oddly poignant sensibility. A bit from "Mostly Sex Stuff," on hooking up with a man without testicles, is particularly illustrative: “Girls don’t care about balls, but when they’re not there we miss them. You know, they’re like grandparents.”

Continue Reading...

So, for all of us who grew up on the notion that prime time requires at least one hapless dude and a cute kid or two at all times, we would like to take a moment to salute our favorite bumbling, bungling single dads. And honorable mentions to the fathers and father figures who didn't quite make the cut, including "Family Affair's" Bill Davis, "The Courtship of Eddie's Father's" Tom Corbett, "Silver Spoons'" Edward Stratton, "Punky Brewster's" Henry Warnimont, "Hannah Montana's" Robby Stewart, "Raising Hope's" Jimmy Chance and "Suburgatory's" George Altman.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

FX Networks President and General Manager John Landgraf, also on the call, seemed to be supportive. "Louis will do whatever he wants to do," Landgraf said.

Continue Reading...

C.K. makes it up the subway steps and arrives at street level, exhaling as if he’s crested some unprecedented summit. He marches into a pizza joint, scarfs most of a giant slice in three bites, then disgusted, throws what remains in the garbage. To watch him eat is akin to watching a junkie shoot heroin; one can trace the convergence of shame and sublimity. All the while there’s music playing, the syncopated up beat of seventies funk. The singer repeats: “Louie, Louie, you’re gonna die.” The camera cuts to another set of stairs, this time a declension, C.K. hustling down to a door marked “Comedy Cellar.” The juxtaposition is stark: here lies humor, at the intersection of pathos and indigestion. We must armor ourselves with laughter.

Continue Reading...

1.) Best drama, or can “Mad Men” hold off “Downton Abbey” and “Homeland”?

There’s a story in the New York Times today all about how psyched PBS is on “Downton Abbey’s” Emmy hopes. Objectively, Season 2 of the British costume drama was inconsistent — Matthew’s vanishing paralysis! Bates turning into a whiny maybe-murderer! That amnesiac heir covered in bandages!— but it’s got momentum, more viewers than “Mad Men” and an audience who doesn’t really care how bad it can be. Moreover, “Mad Men” has won best drama four years in a row, and no show has ever won five in a row. If “Downton’s” not the show to upset “Mad Men," there’s always Showtime’s far more deserving “Homeland."

Continue Reading...

Over the course of its critically acclaimed third season, "Louie" has brought in a slew of recognizable and talented actresses, but the women are consistently and cartoonishly messed up -- deranged to the point where watching them elicits no empathy.

Louie, for his part, mostly stands off to the side and watches this parade of deficiency: Delores (Maria Dizzia), who freaks out at Ikea; Laurie (Melissa Leo), who threatens him with violence if he doesn't perform oral sex on her; Maria Bamford, who plays herself as a neurotic iceberg; and Nancy (Nancy Shayne), who feeds her son raw beef. Even bookstore clerk Liz, played brilliantly by Parker Posey over two episodes, doesn't make the kind of impact she might have if her character was less spastic.

That the women are exaggerated isn't the issue; the show has always been hyperbolic. The female characters in previous seasons were damaged, but often ultimately relatable. Pamela had her issues — just like Louie — but she was a real person with normal, human-style emotions. It was easy to imagine her living next door to you, and it was possible to see why Louie liked her.

Continue Reading...

In bed, Louie dreams of Liz expressing her love for him, a dream that sends him back to the bookstore to find her. (After their last, epic date, he apparently didn’t take her number.) But Liz no longer works there, and in her place is another intense, sparkly-eyed nutjob, Jeanie, played by Chloe Sevigny. Jeanie, for reasons that became both clearer and much less clear as the episode progresses, immediately takes too much interest in helping Louie track Liz down, prodding, goading and nagging him to proceed on his romantic quest to locate Liz, and quickly seeming to care more than Louie about finding her. (This — people who have a clearer sense of their wants and desires than Louie — has been a characteristic of every one of this season’s love interests, including the characters played by Gabby Hoffman, Melissa Leo, Posey, Maria Bamford,  and Louie’s man crush Ramon.)

Continue Reading...

Not to put too fine a point on it, Kay was probably the butchest female character ever seen on TV to that point, and thereafter Leo – a Manhattan native whose father was an editor at Grove Press – followed an unprecedented star trajectory, playing a series of strong, independent, unconventional women. She moved into independent film in her 40s, at an age when many actresses feel themselves driven out of the movies, getting her first Academy Award nomination in 2008, for a memorable performance as a struggling single mom in “Frozen River.” She took home the supporting-actress Oscar two years later, for her hilarious, terrifying and riveting turn as Mark Wahlberg’s immensely flawed but loving mother in David O. Russell’s “The Fighter.” (And later had to apologize for her off-the-cuff acceptance speech: “When I watched Kate [Winslet] two years ago, it looked so fucking easy!”)

Continue Reading...

I spoke with Posey about the two episodes, her character, the way people can surprise you -- and how Louie was being a creep.

Were you a “Louie” fan before appearing on the show?

Continue Reading...

In the first episode, Louie played around with the “how you get someone to break up with you” premise. His solution: Do absolutely nothing, which backfired when he was eviscerated by a woman pointing out just how lazy and pathetic it is to not be an active participant in one's own life. Last week, Louie riffed on the “If a woman rapes a man, is it rape?” premise in the fabulous Melissa Leo episode, that concluded something like, this premise is flawed, there is no equivalency, it's just different. (I am really relieved that this episode aired a few days before this week’s wretched Daniel Tosh rape joke incident, and Louie’s not-so-awesome Twitter defense of Tosh, if only so the episode itself did not get caught up in a baby and bathwater situation.)

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

On stage, C.K. puts over just how tickled he is by the unconventionality of the joke, and it's a joy that suffuses "Louie" as well, an entirely unconventional sitcom. "Louie" is like the gorilla trying to go to the ballet, idiosyncratic and grounded, an oddity acting normally, a show simultaneously strange and utterly believable.

Continue Reading...

Television is in the midst of an extremely fertile period: This golden age of TV, from “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” on down through “30 Rock” and “Parks and Rec,” is a who’s who of shows that do something fresh and new, taking content, themes, language or characters in unprecedented directions. But smuggled into these shows, even the most revolutionary and cutting-edge, is something unoriginal. After the first episode, every installment of a TV show contains large quantities of sameness: The same characters, the same setting, the same premise. For all its innovation, each episode of "The Wire" featured established characters, Baltimore, that dialogue, and a worldview about the humanity-crushing nature of dysfunctional, dying bureaucracies. “Community’s” every episode may intend to blow minds and blow up genres, but audiences came to expect exactly that level of madcap energy every week. On shows like “Breaking Bad,” “Mad Men” and “Louie” (which will air in a block with “Anger Management,” and by its very excellence act as a permanent rebuke), audiences wait for the surprising moment, the one that will be so great and awesome and unlike anything we can specifically imagine.

Continue Reading...

It reminds me very much of my eighth-grade teacher who so desperately hoped to be the mythic sage who made a difference, but failed to realize his well-meaning musings about why “black families can’t stay together these days” did little to raise our awareness of anything other than his own desire to seem good. And this is what "Parenthood" does in its broad-stroke coverage of everything that could happen in the life of a modern American family. Since we're all terrified of being different, there is some point in airing things we might still regard with shame: infidelity, moving back with your parents, not going to college, raising an autistic child, and, finally, interracial dating. As the end product of an interracial date, I find this last theme most interesting. On the show, it’s explored in two story lines.

Continue Reading...

The effect is remarkably fresh and engaging. Even when one of its inspirations doesn't pan out, "Louie" is always trying for something surprising and authentic, something other than the TV usual, and the tone is so open-minded and open-hearted that even when the show stumbles and falls, you rarely feel as though your time was squandered for no good reason. Every single week there are several moments when "Louie" wanders off whatever footpath you thought it was committed to and sprints off into the woods, heading wherever inspiration takes it.

Continue Reading...

Technically this is called "First World Rap," but that's just being politically correct. Running out of organic milk? Having your computer charger all the way on the other side of the room? Those complaints need to be sent directly to the ministry of this.

2. Louis C.K.'s pro-drug stance

"I just love being high," the comedian told Leno Wednesday night. He then admits he would suck dick to get his Percoset back. Right before he wishes he was an alcoholic. I love Louis C.K.

Continue Reading...

The profanity and sexual imagery can be blunt, often unrelentingly so, and their juxtaposition with laid-back, almost Bill Cosby-like domestic scenes is as ungainly as it is fresh. But for all its contradictions and moments of shock-for-shock's sake, "Louie" has a gentle heart, and it probably gets closer to documentary-style independent filmmaking than any half-hour series ever. "Curb your Enthusiasm" is visually just as loose and spontaneous, maybe more so; but it's a plot-driven show, tightly structured and driven by wacky or abrasive high jinks. "Louie" is subtler and more relaxed. Parts of it don't even try to be funny; they just observe Louie floundering in the morass of daily life, trying to be as honest as he can without alienating his friends, family and audience, and seesawing between decency and selfishness, stupidity and wisdom.

Continue Reading...

"And people heard this Tracy shit mostly third-hand. He didn't stand on a public stage and say this stuff. He didn't make these announcements: 'Here, America, are my views.' Where you say something makes a huge difference about what you say and what it means and what you let yourself say…And I think the person who really fucked people up and hurt people with Tracy's words was whoever took it out of that Nashville club and put it on the national stage -- whoever called Huffington Post or whoever started this shit, and said, 'Guess what Tracy Morgan said,' and announced it to the rest of the world. He wasn't trying to say it to the rest of the world. So when I read stuff like, How are gay people going to feel when they read this? Well they didn't have to read it! They weren't part of that show. Maybe there were gay people there who were laughing. You don't fucking know. Nobody gets to say that they represent anybody and they're offended on behalf of the whole world."

Continue Reading...