Louie - "Back" and "Model"

LOUIE IS BACK, YOU GUYS. LOUIE. IS BACK. LOUIE IS BACK!

Seriously, there's just nothing on TV like Louie, and I am so glad we have it back on our screens. Something about Louie Season 4 feels renewed, not that the show was really in need of renewal. It's harder to notice trends in Louie than it is in most shows, since each episodes is almost its own distinct piece. And yet, I can't help but notice the way these first two episodes of the fourth season seemed just a tad different than what came before. Erik Adams of The AV Club pointed out that the show seems to be taking place in daylight far more often this season. There's kind of a brighter glow to these episodes, almost a dreamlike quality. Louie can gravitate from stark realism to total fantasy quickly and gracefully, but these episodes - particularly Model - really favored the second approach.

I quite enjoyed both of these episodes, but "Model" is one of the more fascinating episodes of television I've seen recently. Before we get to that, though, I have to give a few shout outs to "Back". "Back" seems like a collective welcoming us back to the world of Louie, complete with a meta joke about how Louie has aged two years at the start of the episode. (Is this the only time Louie has ever dipped into the wonderful world of meta jokes?). We get a bizarrely hilarious opening scene where garbage men invade Louie's bedroom, a typically sweet and funny story with his daughters, another fun poker night scene, and a classic Louie cringe-comedy scene where he goes to buy a vibrator and severely hurts his back in the process. This is surely one of the shows least tied to format in television history, but even it has patterns it falls back on time and time at this point, such as the cringe-comedy method where Louie gets himself into a humiliating situation and just keeps making it worse for himself.. It's not a bad thing, because Louis manages to put slight twists on it each time, and this particular storyline managed to weave nicely into the mortality-centric stand-up segments of the episode while brilliantly bringing the solution to Louie's back pains right back to the cause of them.

But it's really "Model" that wowed me, and it does so by putting some of the same twists on the "Louie goes on a date with a girl and totally fucks it up" formula that was first born way back in the shows' pilot episode. Actually, it puts a new twist on the entire concept of the male fantasy, the idea that any guy can sleep with the beautiful woman of his dreams if he just tries really hard to make her like him. "Model" is notably dreamy, and Blake's line that "maybe this isn't really happening" might just be true. The entire thing is filled with dream logic, from the cartoonish depiction of wealthy people to the fact that the one girl who actually liked Louie's set just magically steps outside for a smoke as he's walking out. "Model" analyzes the truth of the fantasies, and the entire "stumpy guy gets hot woman" concept that we see time and time again in media. If those kind of stories show us the sexy, optimistic side of male fantasy, Louie is presenting the darkest fears of it, the idea that you're just not supposed to be with this kind of person, the idea that fantasies are just fantasies. "Model" blends the line between the dream world and the real world in heartbreaking fashion. The truth is that Louie and Blake, despite the fact that they shared intimacy in a bed, are worlds apart, and nothing can bring them together. Not sex. Not laughs. Not tickling. We like to think anything is possible, but the truth is that we all occupy our own spaces, and if your space doesn't line up with another persons' space, it's going to go wrong. You're going to either punch someone in the face or get punched yourself. This all isn't happening. It will never. It can't. If we can accept that, we can at least have a pretty nice time with a down-to-earth waitress back in regular old NYC. Otherwise, we'll wind up in a jail cell in the Hamptons, wondering why we even bothered at all.