After more than a year off, Louie returned, and came back every bit as odd and idiosyncratic as ever. This time, Louie did perhaps the single most unexpected thing of all: it embraced continuity and spent most of its season telling a single story about Louie and his love life, albeit with a couple of detours along the way (most notably a double-length episode about Louie's first exposure to pot). What the season has lacked, if I'm being honest, is the gloriously weird and surreal touches of humor that the show did best; while the season kicked off with a wonderfully odd moment involving garbage truck workers, most of the season was fairly grounded, finding what humor there was from people, their conversations, and Louie's standup. All of that sounds like I'm bashing this season, but it shouldn't; indeed, in some ways, this may be the best season of Louie to date, even if it's the least experimental and offbeat to date. What Louie lacked in chaos, it gained in depth and complexity, exploring the double standards about men and women's weight, allowing its female characters their own voice, questioning the male gaze, and doing it all while bringing out some fantastic comedy, too. As always with Louie, the show is unmistakably entirely CK's brainchild, and sometimes that leads to odd threads like his recurring relationship with the outwardly toxic and often cruel Pamela. But all of that somehow makes the show almost more fascinating, feeling like part experiment, part therapy session, part comedy, part drama, and part playful effort just to throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And when some of the things that stick are Charles Grodin as an irritable doctor, that phenomenal monologue at the end of "So Did the Fat Lady," the perfect relationship between Louie and his daughters, and so many others, it's hard for me not to love Louie - even if it doesn't always work, it's always a joy to watch unfold, and the end result is so wholly unique and wonderful that it's hard not to love it.
- Josh Mauthe
- Josh Mauthe
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