I realize that Quvenzhane Wallis is probably pretty busy, but this video just proves that MTV needs to be filling its empty programming slots with The Quvenzhane Dance-Off. You think it's easy to bust a move in a knee-length skirt? It's not. I would also accept Teen Mom Competitive Waltzing, 16 and Dougieing, and The Challenge: Choque.
It’s probably fitting that the two shows that make former New Yorkers feel the most complicated dim sum array of emotions, Louie and Saturday Night Live, conflated last weekend, less than a week after Superstorm Sandy slammed the East Coast. Missing a regional joke on "Weekend Update" or watching Louis eat at Russ & Daughters can give transplants a mean case of the wistfuls, especially if you spent the past week biting your nails and watching weather reports of swirling gray clouds, wondering if things were going to be Okay, Bad, or The Worst Imaginable. I tried, and failed, to learn to skateboard a few blocks from the Comedy Cellar; when I would come back to New York during winter break in college, I’d sneak in with friends and drink uncomfortably as comics picked on us because we were obviously terrified of being poked fun at (so, inevitably, we were) for wearing skimpy tank tops under our giant parkas. It’s easy to identify with the Louis of Louie even if you’ve never felt your sneakers stick to the floor of a pizza joint on MacDougal, but most people who leave New York allow themselves a private imaginary identity that still wanders around Union Square at night with headphones on and rents a tiny apartment with a bleak but voyeuristic imaginary view into a nonexistent neighbor’s living room, and Louie sure has a way of stoking the fires of that fantasy. In an e-mail sent to fans before SNL aired, Louis C.K. wrote:
Louis C.K.'s dictatorially controlled sitcom/weekly short film/art project/sometime comedy-delivery system Louie will wrap its third season tonight on FX. It's been a tremendous run: Heightened plot coherence, including two multi-episode arcs; unforgettable cameos by Parker Posey, David Lynch, and Melissa Leo, along with welcome spots from Robin Williams, Marc Maron, Maria Bamford, Paul Rudd, Susan Sarandon, and Jerry Seinfeld; advanced prowess in the filmmaking, scoring, and writing. Even in the few wonky moments, it's been a pleasure to witness C.K. whittling this series toward further excellence the way he did with his stand-up act and his business acumen. While Sir Szekely has built the show around his nonexistent need of assistance, we're in for a long, bitter Louie-less stretch of months after tonight's finale, so we're gonna daydream about Season 4 for just a moment. Here are 10 humble requests for a man who takes orders from no one.
Here's Louis C.K., tweeting about Tig Notaro's stand-up comedy set at L.A. club Largo on Saturday night: "[I]n 27 years doing this, I've seen a handful of truly great, masterful standup sets. One was Tig Notaro last night at Largo." What exactly went down? Notaro, a 41-year-old comedy veteran enjoying a recent upswing in her career, explained to the audience she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, and then went on to do some tear-inducing comedy about it. Kira Hesser, a comedian and writer who was in the audience, captured the scene in a Tumblr post:
Last night’s breathtaking episode of Louie also served as a remarkable change of pace. Not only did it pick up the events of last week’s wonderful “Daddy’s Girlfriend” — a surprising blast of continuity for the famously shaggy show — it also provided a brilliant showcase for the talents of Parker Posey, the onetime “Queen of the Indies." As Liz (née Tape Recorder), Louis C.K.’s bookish, possibly bananas date, Posey was a revelation, leading our hero like a schlubby Dante through the vibrant underworld that is New York City.
Alternately tender and terrifying, “Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2” was both a creative breakthrough for an already excellent show and a long-needed turn in the spotlight for Posey, one of the most gifted actors alive at revealing the brittle cracks hiding behind every smile. Speaking to me via cell phone from Los Angeles, where the longtime Manhattanite was taking meetings and “dodging grass cutters,” Posey was funny, engaging, and breathless. When I ended the call by complimenting her again on her performance, she replied like the working actor she is. “Thank you,” she laughed. “Hopefully someone will see it. And give me a job.”
Delayed but never denied, the Hollywood Prospectus podcast tackled The Newsroom (2:10) this week, and with it the most pressing issues of 2010. Wait, scratch that. Instead, we debated the show’s merits, considering one of us kinda liked it and the other, well . . . We also discussed the return of Louie (22:00), a show both Chris and I came late to, and how the secret to appreciating this comedy is realizing it’s not really a comedy at all. From there it was onto music, where we discussed Fiona Apple, her critically-lauded new album, and her mega-revealing interview in New York magazine (30:44). When an artist acts up is it genuine? Is it for the spotlight? And is it ever possible to separate the two?
Then it was time to introduce a new Mixtape feature on the pod (39:35), where Chris and I will each make Spotify playlists to enchant and frustrate our listeners. Chris’s surprisingly rock-heavy first offering is called Up North (Of The Wall) Trips while my wider-ranging mix is Something Beautiful You Can Truly Own. Mine features late-breaking nominee for Summer Jam 2012, French Montana’s “Pop That” (warning: link is NSFA – Not Safe For Anything). We ended the talk with the latest entry in the Double Down Book Club, Don Winslow, whose book Savages is soon to be an Oliver Stone movie starring the box-office-gold-certified Taylor Kitsch. And, hey! All fans of the Double Down Book Club (48:27) should know that we now have an official, permanent home on the internet: snitchbutlers.tumblr.com. As of this moment, it’s updated through the first two entrants into the DDBC, George Pelecanos and James Crumley, but soon it will be the go-to place for all your hard-boiled, whiskey-addled, page-turning needs.)
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A little more than six months ago, you might remember, Louis C.K. came on the B.S. Report to promote his new comedy special and discuss Season 2 of Louie. Well, we got the band back together — this time around, we discussed Season 3 of Louie (premiering Thursday on FX at 10:30 p.m.), his ambitious strategy to bypass all the ticketing agencies for his 2012 comedy tour (check out www.louisck.com for details), the year of the Backlash to the Backlash to the Backlash, why he loves hate-watching Aaron Sorkin shows, why he was fine with Bradley stealing the last Pacquiao fight (and why it made him like Manny more), what lessons he's applied from boxing to help his own career, and a few other curve balls you might not expect.
Well, this is a surprise. Louis C.K. — currently killing the game with his FX show, his stand-up specials, and his general winningly dour demeanor — is writing and producing a comedy for CBS. The show, about an “ensemble of young people who are trying to achieve their creative dreams in these tough financial times,” is co-created with Spike Feresten, his old pal from his Letterman writing room days. (Feresten has also written for The Simpsons and Seinfeld. More interestingly: He hosted Fox’s late-night program Talkshow with Spike Feresten for three years without anyone ever really knowing it existed.) So: Should CBS President Les Moonves now be afraid for his life via the ire of a put-upon Louis C.K.? Or has Louis C.K. somehow gotten the “Louis C.K. deal” over at the big-boy network?
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
Predicament: The season finale of Curb’s New York adventure has everything you’d want: pre-gay seven-year-olds, Mayor Bloomberg, Nazi iconography, narrative symmetry, and the highest concentration of Parkinson’s disease jokes per minute in sitcom history, presumably.
Too bad that the amazingly sassy, kid who played Ana Gasteyer’s Project Runway-loving, swastika-appreciating son Greg had the misfortune of appearing in the same episode where Michael J. Fox got to play himself as (maybe?) a diabolical bastard who uses his debilitating illness to completely fuck with Larry David, otherwise that’s all people would be talking about. Instead, Fox, perhaps ticked at being shushed by Larry at a piano bar, has a field day playing with his own saintly image, and ultimately uses his vast influence to get Larry kicked out of New York for miming a violin during Fox’s benefit speech. Although Larry doesn’t actually leave until he’s once again asked to appear at a charity event for ill children — then he and Leon are off to harass pig-parkers in Paris.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
Predicament: The main objective of “Hermanos” is to establish Gustavo Fring’s origin story and the source of his conflict with the cartel and the now-silent Tio Hector, just as Hank seems to be backing the stoic chicken man into a corner. But that increased scrutiny — combined with Walt’s unwitting participation in Hank’s case and Jesse’s apparent shift in loyalty towards the man he’s supposed to be poisoning with ricin — causes Walt to feel strangely simpatico with the man he’s been trying to murder all season. (You know, in self-defense.) He knows this looks bad and wants Gus to understand he wants no part of the tracking-device scheme Hank is counting on to counter Gus’ ice-cold, largely redemptive questioning.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
Predicament: Perhaps galvanized by making clear to Skyler where he resides on the guy-who-knocks-or-doesn’t-knock continuum last week, he both disregards her instructions about returning Walt Jr.’s new Challenger to the dealership by instead blowing it up (rather than walking away from the explosion, he sits and watches it while calling for a cab) and revels in her discomfort over the sheer amounts of cash she’s being tasked with laundering, as well as her realization that a car wash is insufficient as a cover. He also provides a vial of ricin for Jesse to slip his new pal Gus.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon this week? Let us count the ways.
Predicament: Here comes the hangover: The morning after drinking too much red wine and telling too many DEA agents that the dead meth chemist they’re investigating is a mere pretender and the real Heisenberg is still out there, wink wink, Walt wakes up with a giant headache. Make that two — Skyler is understandably concerned that someone may knock on their door one night and shoot Walt in the face. His response is chilling. Not only is he too indispensable to his employers’ concerns to be in danger, he’s actually the one who will knock on someone’s door. Skyler gets the message loud and clear: Her passive high-school chemistry teacher husband is no passive middle-manager; he’s a stone-cold killer, and if she has any illusions that they’re going to get out of this thing clean, she is mistaken. She takes Holly and drives to Four Corners, and even after two coin flips tell her to keep driving to Colorado, she can’t do it.
How are television’s favorite angry white males of a certain age feeling put-upon and impotent this week? Let us count the ways.
Predicament: Double the Louie episodes (seriously, what’s your hurry, FX?) means double the opportunity for angst. In the first, Louie appears on Red Eye (!) to vigorously defend the art of self-doin’ it against a prim, virtuous Ellen of Citizens Against Masturbation on behalf of everyone who’s ever lived, save for her. She appeals to his loneliness and desperation and dares him to come to one of her meetings, but not before he fantasizes about shoving an entire bag of dicks into an attractive elevator passenger suffering from a crippling case of no-dicks-up-in-here. Louie shows up at the end of a CAM meeting, then goes out for a drink with Ellen, then ends up back at her hotel suite with her cozied up next to him in a silk robe. He tries to kiss her, with predictably doomed results, and she proceeds to talk him through how amazing sex could be if they fell in love slowly and then got married. He, of course, uses this as inspiration in the hotel bathroom, which proves to be much sexier material than NPR reports about African genocide.
Last week’s episode of Louie opened with a quasi simulation of his failed HBO show Lucky Louie, punctuated by Louis C.K. wearing a backward baseball cap and destroying the concept (and his hypothetical career) by questioning the realism of what they were doing. For maybe 90 seconds I found myself thinking, “Goddammit, here we go. This is it. This is going to be the first bad episode of Louie, because he’s going to obsess over something that’s essential only to him and not especially new and not even accurate (because the show he seemed to be satirizing wasn’t how Lucky Louie actually was).”
And then — of course — the episode changed. It didn’t just become unbad; it became incredible. The more I think about it, the more I suspect the interaction with Dane Cook might be the strongest seven-minute stretch I’ve ever seen on television: It’s realer than any reality show, more emotionally complicated than most 300-page memoirs, yet still awkward and severe and (somehow) easy to watch. I want to know everything about this scene — I want to know if this conversation truly happened, I want to know Cook’s views on his involvement, and I want to know C.K.’s deeper intent. And I can tell I’m not the only one who feels this way. What’s so distinctly compelling about this season of Louie is how everyone seems to collectively realize that what C.K. is doing is not only cool, but also authentically artful and unnaturally profound. There’s no debate over its value because there’s no contradictory position to take. It’s not polarizing in any important way: If you’re watching this show, you intuitively know it's fantastic (and substantially unlike the way fantastic TV typically is).
