I have gone on about the merits of Louie as being one of the best television shows currently on. From its weird way of giving us at times a very graphic and too detailed look into the mind of Louis CK to its hilarious one off bits that end in the simplest of humor are awe inspiring, as well as other things. In “Halloween/Ellie” we get barely any of those things and by this point they feel tired and overused.
We start off the storyline of the episode with Louie and his girls going trick-or-treating. From the start hopes and standards are set high because Louie’s oldest daughter is dressed as Frederick Douglass, the great proclamator. This joke leads us no where except for one weird reaction about who she is dressed as. Instead we follow them around for a bit after dark because the girls wanted to continue to trick-or-treat and we get a bunch of drunks in costumes and weirdo assholes around. The direction gets a little creative, something this show is known for, with some creative swipes and use of grain to make it feel like a sort of horror movie but we go nowhere new. Instead we get go back to the fact that we already know Louie is kind of a pussy and his daughters can do more standing up than he can.
In the second half, “Ellie”, we find Louie at a writer intervention, basically when a studio finds a bunch of writers to jazz up a lame duck script they feel like green-lighting for the cash. Louie comes up with a better premise for the first page than the jaded twerp who only picks on the opening without any creative input. This gets Louie noticed by the exec who is sitting in. She invites him out to lunch to hear his other ideas and here is where we are smacked in the face with another used Louie trope, a thing about a guy where his life just keeps getting worse. We found this same premise when Louie complained about the pilot he was filming earlier in the season with Bob Saget.
Louie is such a creative and wonderful show that it is shocking to see it take such a dive with the season now only three episodes away from its end. Granted the next episode will be an hour long but that doesn’t make up for such a dive that we could have done with earlier on in the season. It really should be a clear indicator that the episode was just going nowhere when we are interjected with even more than usual standup routine by Louis CK. Yes, there have been episode where the second half has been devoted entirely to his setup but it has never been used as such filler like it was here. By the end I felt like I was drowning in routine I could probably see him do live or on video or some other multimedia format. Granted, Louie’s worst episodes fare better than most things on TV but when I can find an episode of Louie only as good as the best a CBS comedy can produce I get kind of worried.
Grade: C-
Ed. Side Note:
Again, The amount of standup this episode just felt kind of unbearable.
“They die on a rock with a bear eating their face.”
