Louis C.K. put a stand-up set in front of a short film and let them argue. That made television nobody else was making; left alone he does not know when to stop, and the best thing he touched got better after he left it.
Fi1m perspective
An episode of Louie (2010) opens in a small New York club. Louis C.K. tells a joke about his daughters, the audience laughs, and then the club is gone and we are in a flat that looks like the half of the furniture he was allowed to keep, watching the same man fail at something small. Nobody had tried that on American television. He wrote it, directed it, edited it and played it, single camera, on location, no storyboards, and the episodes look like it. Some of those short films are remarkable. Some are a man indulging himself. Often it is the same episode.
The habit comes from stand-up. He started in Boston clubs in the mid-1980s, moved to New York in 1989 and spent years writing for other people's programmes, among them Conan O'Brien's and Chris Rock's. Pootie Tang (2001) was a feature he wrote and directed that found its audience later. Lucky Louie (2006), a multi-camera sitcom for HBO, was the conventional version of what he wanted to do. Louie was the version with the rules taken out, and it ran until 2015. "To me, the default is to do it all-- write, shoot, and then cut it together," he said in 2011.
The best case for the method is a series he did not finish. He created Better Things (2016) with Pamela Adlon, who had acted in Louie, directed the pilot and wrote and directed a good deal of the first year, with Paul Koestner shooting. That first season borrows the Louie shape: short pieces, cut hard, filmed as if nobody had told the actors where the camera was. He left after the second season and the series got looser, slower and better, because Adlon lets a shot run where he would have cut.
For other directors he is easier company. In American Hustle (2013) he plays Stoddard Thorsen, the exhausted boss who keeps trying to tell a story about ice fishing with his brother and is never allowed to finish, and it is the only scene in the film that knows when to stop. Left with a feature's running time he meanders; I Love You, Daddy (2017) was faulted for exactly that.
In 2017 he admitted to sexual misconduct, and because Louie was built from his life, that changed what it is. Going back to it, we found the stand-up still funny and the short films harder to sit through, and the reason is on screen: the material about men, sex and being forgiven now reads as a man asking to be excused. He has released his stand-up through his own website since, still doing it all himself. On the evidence of Better Things, the best television with his name on it got better once he had stopped directing it.
Biography
Louis C.K., born Louis Székely on 12 September 1967 in Washington, D.C., is an American comedian, actor, writer, director and producer.
He co-created the FX series Better Things (2016) with Pamela Adlon and received credits as creator, writer, teleplay writer, director, editor and story contributor on episodes in its first two seasons. He has also created, written, directed and starred in the series Louie (2010–2015) and appeared in films including American Hustle (2013) and Blue Jasmine (2013).
In November 2017, following public allegations of sexual misconduct which he admitted, FX ended its association with him and he had no further involvement in Better Things.
