I don’t have cable TV, but I saw one episode at a friend’s house. I thought it was funny and a bit – a tiny bit – touching.
Superficially, it resembles early-seasons “Seinfeld” – a lot. Guy’s a stand-up comic, with bits of his act interspersed with real-life parallels. Some of the humor is cruel, and the lead character looks like a jerk sometimes.
But in other ways, the shows couldn’t be more different. Where S was slickly produced and – with only a few exceptions – made no attempt to look like anything but a studio-bound sitcom, L looks like a documentary, with cramped, dingy interiors, sometimes harsh lighting and awkward camera angles. (Thankfully free of shaky-cam, random zooming and sudden intentional loss of focus, at least in the episode I saw.) The characters look like real people (i.e., slobs) rather than carefully made-up and coiffed actors.
Whereas Jerry was usually portrayed as smug, shallow, and successful, Louis seems to be self-loathing, socially and political aware, and struggling. Whereas S was reveling in perpetual adolescence, L dwells in morbidity and mortality.
Although both shows clearly have elements of autobiography, “Louie” seems to deal more with real people and their frailties.
Behind the scenes, “Seinfeld” was largely the creation of Larry David. “Louie” is written, directed, and even edited by Louis C.K.
Edit: What it wasn’t was a 30-minute yuk-fest. It certainly had humor, but if you’re expecting a laugh riot you’ll probably be disappointed. (Of course, for all I know the one episode I’ve seen wasn’t typical.)
