Acerbic, intelligent, honest and brave, "Lucky Louie" has everything going for it but what it needs most: laughs. In what may be the first U.S. sitcom to fully appreciate the new Wal-Mart culture, Louis C.K. overturns all the bad soil of Bush America and up wriggle the worms: bad jobs, urban misery, hopelessness, racism, crime, and the prospect of painful decline. Sexual dysfunction cracks inject a note of cheer.
If the satire isn't all that funny, maybe it's because the real concern is showing us the pathos of low circumstances. The show is a social mirror, a harsh one. Do we like what we see? Can we chuckle along with portraits of people being crushed by a society that flatters itself to believe that the McMansion is just over the hill?
It's pretty transgressive stuff. I liked Jim Norton's portrayal of the drug-dealing sleazeball Jim, who in a moment of eavesdropping through a tenement wall gives us his porn-trained translation of the noisy maneuvers going on behind it. But a lot of the time the humor is wince-worthy tragicomedy; this is a comedy in need of comic relief from its own moroseness. Talents like Chris Morris, Ricky Gervais, and in the U.S. the creators of the short-lived 1999 Fox gem "Action" have shown that when done right, this vein can be much funnier. 6/10.
If the satire isn't all that funny, maybe it's because the real concern is showing us the pathos of low circumstances. The show is a social mirror, a harsh one. Do we like what we see? Can we chuckle along with portraits of people being crushed by a society that flatters itself to believe that the McMansion is just over the hill?
It's pretty transgressive stuff. I liked Jim Norton's portrayal of the drug-dealing sleazeball Jim, who in a moment of eavesdropping through a tenement wall gives us his porn-trained translation of the noisy maneuvers going on behind it. But a lot of the time the humor is wince-worthy tragicomedy; this is a comedy in need of comic relief from its own moroseness. Talents like Chris Morris, Ricky Gervais, and in the U.S. the creators of the short-lived 1999 Fox gem "Action" have shown that when done right, this vein can be much funnier. 6/10.