Honest laughs to warm the winter nights

Winter appears to have been delayed until this week, so there has been no better time to be curled up on the couch. I decided to skip watching Lance Armstrong get teary-eyed though (well, for 30 seconds anyway) as he ‘fessd up to Oprah about his rather spectacular fall from grace. Instead, I feasted on new material on Tuesday night with the arrival of Louie on Fox.

The series (already finished its third season in the US) has generated rave responses from critics and audiences so I’ve long been awaiting its arrival on these shores.

Parent teacher meetings and poker night with your buddies may not seem like the most riveting material for a comedy show but don’t let that put you off. Nor is it a whole new concept – stand-up comedian playing a slightly more world-weary version of himself. We’ve seen it before in Curb Your Enthusiasm where Seinfeld co-creator Larry David stars as a fictionalised version of himself. And, like Seinfeld, we see excerpts from the lead character’s stand-up sets within the show. That’s where the comparisons end though, as this is an altogether different animal. It’s sharper, very black and more real.

Louis CK is well-placed to know what it takes to write good comedy. He’s spent significant chunks of his career writing for the likes of Chris Rock, Conan O’Brien and David Letterman. Directing, writing, producing and staring in Louie, he has taken his craft to a new level by fully embracing the persona of the overweight, middle-aged, single, put-upon father.

Filmed as a series of vignettes, punctuated with clips of Louie performing stand-up in New York’s Comedy Cellar, it has no convenient plot resolutions and, apart from Louie himself, no recurring characters. He’s also, very unusually, got full editorial control over its content and doesn’t have to have scripts approved by studio heads – a very rare fish indeed. The cumulative effect is it’s like nothing on air at the moment and nothing is too far left-field to explore.

It isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, although it does have its moments, like when he rails against helping kids at his daughters’ school open milk cartons. “It’s too subtle a design for a seven-year-old. They have to pick at the glue and end up drinking out of this finger-filth disease spout.”

But therein is the genius of Louie. While hitting the punchline effortlessly, his meandering and musings on the way makes you stop and think – why haven’t they changed the design of milk cartons?

Vulgar yet honest, Louie is smart enough to make a lot of jokes at his own expense while sidestepping the tired old sitcom clichés. He may dwell a lot on the disappointments of middle age but most of the time it’s hard not to laugh, and identify, with him as he catalogues his misfortunes and insecurities.

Going back to playing poker with his mates. You would expect a group of men discussing homosexuality around a poker table to be nothing short of crass. Instead, it’s a touching scene in which Louie truly tries to get a handle on using particular material in his stand-up act.

One of them, Rick (Rick Crom), is actually gay. When you think the conversation is heading down the gay slur route (“I talk about gay sex more with you guys than I do with any of my gay friends. You’re obsessed”) it quickly changes to something more poignant and real. When Louie asks him if he thinks it’s okthat he uses the word “faggot” during his stand-up, Rick explains how that word went from meaning a bundle of kindling wood, to a word that “Every gay man has had shouted at them while they’re being beaten up… So, when you say it, it sort of brings it all back”.

“So should I be using that word onstage?” asks Louie. “By all means say it, get your laughs,” Rick replies. “But now you know what it means.”

It’s an intelligent scene and one that makes the show all the richer for showing it.

Another new US import on Tuesday, this time on Sky Atlantic, The Following is a less charismatic offering than the aforementioned show.

A bloody mess is a far more accurate a take on Kevin Williamson’s (Scream) new creation. It’s a tale of Edgar Allan Poe obsessed serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) whose spree is ended by FBI man Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon). But then he breaks out of prison with a whole new plan for causing mayhem, only to purposefully get captured again so he can send Hardy round the twist.

There were so many flaws with this that I don’t know where to begin.

The gimmick to try set this apart from just another episode of Criminal Minds is that Carroll has a legion of internet followers who are all too willing to partake in the madman’s attempts to create art from murder based on Poe’s works. Therefore Poe’s ‘by removing a victim’s eyes, you are taking away their identity’ theory results in a woman stabbing herself through the eye after a text message from Carroll and another having her eyes removed muscle by muscle. Even by gross-out standards, this was pretty horrific.

The FBI have missed the real investigation however – how did Carroll have such ease of access to the internet and more specifically Facebook while he was supposed to be under lock and key? There’s the real mystery.