Ah, the summer. No school, beautiful weather, trips to the beach, summer romance. It seems that everything is right in the world.
Wrong. Very wrong.
The summer’s most egregious offense is the abundance of terrible, terrible programming. Summer network programming tends to really churn out mindless reality shows that tend to run at lower costs than any scripted series. For example, this summer on ABC, you can look forward to The Bachelorette, Bachelor(ette) spin-off show Bachelor Pad, ABC’s perennial embarrassment Wipeout, and five other reality series that I really don’t care enough about to mention.
But, if you’re as TV-obsessed as I am and need your fix of quality scripted television, there is hope for this summer. FX is coming to the rescue, my friends. This summer you can look forward to stand-up legend Louis C.K.’s excellent Louie, a personal favorite of mine, as well as a new adaptation of an Australian comedy, Wilfred, starring Elijah Wood.
Louie came out strong in its first season last year. Louis C.K. is no stranger to television, having already written and produced the foul-mouthed but earnest Lucky Louie, a controversial take on multi-camera sitcoms on HBO that was cancelled after one season. FX’s Louie, much like Lucky Louie and in the spirit of shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, features C.K. playing a fictionalized version of himself (a narrative technique pioneered by Gary Shandling on HBO’s The
Larry Sanders Show).
But Louie is not a conventional half-hour comedy. At C.K.’s request, Louie is shot almost completely on location in New York City, and it heavily features segments of C.K.’s standup in New York clubs like The Comedy Cellar. Before you immediately jump to the conclusion that C.K. is just ripping off a narrative device from Seinfeld, know that Louie’s tone and structure is remarkably different from any comedy that has come before it. In addition to being laugh-out-loud funny, Louie has an incredibly dark tone to it. Louie often grapples with the troubles of fatherhood as well as such broad and controversial topics as race, religion, and divorce. Structurally, episodes of Louie often end up being a series of vignettes and small snippets of Louie’s life connected thematically rather than standard three-act sitcoms. The structure is a huge risk, but it pays off in spades. Louie w as one of the best comedies on television in its first season, and as long as C.K. stays on his game, it will certainly continue to stretch the conventions of television comedy.
Along with the superb Louie comes Wilfred, FX’s newest half-hour comedy starring Elijah W ood and Jason Gann, who co-created and starred in the Australian series of the same name. Wood plays Ryan, who is str uggling to find his niche in the world until he meets and befriends Wilfred, his neighbor’s dog who, for some reason, he sees as a pot-smoking, foul-mouthed Australian man in a furry dog suit. Stay with me here. Ryan is the only person who sees Wilfred this way, making this a sort of Calvin and Hobbes situation in which Wilfred teaches Ryan how to embrace the world around him, undoubtedly through lots of ridiculous and slightly existential adventures. The series is based on an Australian comedy created by Gann and fellow Aussie Adam Zwar. The Australian series was itself based on Gann and Zwar’s original short film, which won the honor of Best Comedy at the Australian film festival Tropfest. You can watch the short here.
So if you, like myself, tend to have an averse reaction to most reality TV, don’t fret, FX is gonna help us out this summer. Here’s to some good summer TV!
