This fall marks the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind, so lots of folks are talking and writing about how life-changing the release of that record was. But in 1991, Nevermind was not unilaterally appreciated — people argued about its merits constantly, and a lot of people hated it. We generally agree it’s awesome now, but that agreement is retrospective. Louie is not like that. Right now, Louie is like the Beatles in ’66, or maybe Joe DiMaggio in ’41. These half-hour explorations are not just deftly written, but formally inventive — the episode in which his racist aunt dies is structured unlike any American situation comedy ever produced. The episode from two weeks ago (when Louie explains why he needs to tell the person he loves that he loves her, even though he knows she can’t reciprocate) offhandedly illuminated a paradox I’ve unsuccessfully thought about for more than 20 years. I don’t have kids, but — if I did — I feel like Louie would resonate so deeply I’d almost be afraid of it. The level of insight and weirdness C.K. is jamming into these shows is flat-out unimpeachable, and I somehow get the sense that his entire audience is having the same experience as me. It’s a shared recognition of perfection, happening in the present tense. And this is not a situation like 2003, when everyone just sort of temporarily agreed that "Hey Ya!" was a terrific single; this is different. This is someone working on the most radical edge of mainstream culture and succeeding brilliantly without ever doing the same thing twice. There is no antecedent.
Okay, here goes: The episode in which Louie's racist aunt dies was the most obvious thing in the history of obvious obviousness. Of course having built up her connection to the past, she'd turn out to be super racist. Of course it was going to derail the conversation and prevent the whole point of the trip from ever happening. Of course as soon as she left the room it was obvious she was going to die. If a viewer couldn't see those plot points coming from oh-so-far away, I can only conclude that said viewer has never watched any television ever. It was a fine episode of TV, but let's not pretend like a TV show which, I'm guessing, perhaps two or three million people watch is remotely comparable to any actual pop cultural phenomenon. This is not DiMaggio in '41: this is the Velvet Underground in '70, after Loaded.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
2 comments:
I love Klosterman, but he misses the mark more often than not when he writes about TV. He sounds like a teenage girl from the 1980s who isn't aware that Different Strokes is not exactly a cutting-edge cultural event.
Usually I have no problems letting this kind of hyperbole go, but after the second or third sentence of this paragraph it was obvious that someone needed to point out what was wrong with it.
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