Defying Definition: Louie Season 2
September 10th, 2011
I haven’t written about Louie all season, which makes me one of the only people who hasn’t done so.
Sometimes when this happens I’ll go into the archives and find vast collections of half-written reviews sitting in my “Drafts” section, like all of those failed attempts to discuss How to Make it In America last summer that never got past “Hey, isn’t that theme song awesome?”
However, there are no half-written drafts for Louie, despite the show pretty easily cementing itself as the best comedy of the summer (and probably the second best drama as well), and in tagging this post I discovered I’ve never written a post specifically about Louie. Admittedly, I fell a few weeks behind at least twice over the course of the season, which made the idea of covering it weekly all but impossible (despite the fact that I actually had screeners for the first four episodes). That being said, I do think that this is symptomatic more than it is causal, as I never really felt a particular need to be “caught up.”
While internet chatter created a great deal of temptation, the fact that episodes piled up on my DVR is not a point of disinterest but rather a lack of motivation. Without any sort of serialized element that could be spoiled, and without any continuity that would convince me to catch up on more than one episode on a time, I sort of developed my own pace, stopping and starting wherever I saw fit. Individual episodes proved more engrossing, but immediately turning on the next episode seemed unnecessary. There were logical stopping points, and so I stopped, often for longer than I had initially intended.
However, I was caught up in time for tonight’s season finale, and I do want to write at least a little bit about the show given that the second season has been pretty tremendous. Specifically, I’m interested in the ways in which the show’s lack of “continuity” creates some particularly interesting questions when it comes to a finale. Within television genres, only sitcoms are really exempt from any form of continuity when it comes to finales, and even they often angle towards ongoing storylines or future developments in a finale in this day and age. Considering the finale raises questions about the generic qualities of the series and the formal debate ongoing regarding its structure, which in turn leads into a comparison of my own and a discussion of comparisons in general, which as a whole represents the collective impact of Louie‘s season and finale: there’s a heck of a lot to talk about.
Cultural Learnings 