Louis C.K.
Eric Leibowitz/FX

Louis C.K. adds his stand-up to the new FX comedy, Louie.

Louie, which premieres tonight at 11:00 p.m. on FX, is not going to be to everyone's tastes, but it's significantly more interesting than anything that's premiered in quite a while, comedy-wise.

Its star, Louis C.K., is a revered comedian in spite of suffering some high-profile flame-outs, including the sitcom Lucky Louie, which had a brief run on HBO in 2006. You may have seen him (but statistically, you probably didn't) as Leslie Knope's cop boyfriend during this season of Parks And Recreation.

But he's a guy who very much benefits from the loosening up of the comedy format, as well as the expansion into cable that brings Louie to FX. Because although it's not going to appeal to everyone, for people who find normal sitcom rhythms frustrating, it's a deep breath of very fresh air.

 

The very loose structure uses parts of C.K.'s stand-up and vaguely related vignettes in which he's playing a divorced father (which he also is in real life), but as he's been clear in stating (as in this great interview at The A.V. Club), it's not strictly autobiographical. (That interview is also highly recommended for his explanation of how he came to do the show at FX, which tells you a lot about what the expansion of lower-cost cable shows could potentially do for creative people.)

While the mix of stand-up and sort-of-autobiographical narrative is certainly reminiscent of Seinfeld, the narrative segments are much more like little movies and much less like television comedy. There's no laugh track and no restrictive structure where you get a few initial jokes, followed by a problem, followed by a complication, followed by a resolution. The tone is naturalistic and ragged, almost like one of the current quasi-documentary comedies without the talking heads.

This isn't comedy that comes from particularly quotable lines; it comes from thoroughly earthbound matters — in the pilot, a kids' field trip and a first date. It makes a certain amount of sense; terrific stand-ups focus on teasing surprising observations out of familiar situations (there's a reason airline food and missing socks became cliches in the first place). The vignette segments in Louie ultimately communicate the same general sense of curiosity about mundane things that feeds a well-constructed stand-up routine.

It's very much worth checking out, even if it turns out not to be precisely up your alley, just as an example of a show that's experimenting with tone and format in comedy even beyond the single-camera/laugh-trackless revolution of the last several years.