Louie - "Into the Woods"

There are some episodes of Louie that take a while to sit me. I would guess that's pretty much natural with a show like Louie, a show that's constantly pushing the format of television to greater and greater heights - and weirder and weirder places. For a lot of its running time, I wondered just what the hell "Into the Woods" was doing. It seemed to be a short film about why you shouldn't smoke pot in middle school randomly plopped into the middle of what's been a very carefully constructed season of television, and while I enjoyed it for basically all of its running time, I wondered what purpose it was serving to the shows' narrative as a whole. And hell, maybe it wasn't serving any purpose! Maybe Louis CK just felt like telling this story and didn't give a damn about taking a break from the narrative he had set up for the season thus far. That may very well be part of it, and considering the show we're dealing with here, it'd be par for the course and completely acceptable, in my books.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize "Into the Woods" lines up pretty directly with Louie's narrative arc this season. It is, ultimately, a story about how Louie's turbulent adolescent relationship with his mother is paving way to how he's dealing with a nearly parallel relationship he's experiencing with his daughter. In a season that has been marked by Louie's relationships with the various women in his life and the trouble he has communication with them, it's incredibly interesting to see all of this traced back to his relationship with his mother as a child. That's influencing his relationship with his daughter, but it's doing so in ways that may very well be the opposite of how we might expect them to be. Instead of making Louie's mistakes force him into hypersensitivity over his discovery of his daughter smoking weed, it influences him to be open to her - both because his mother wasn't, but more importantly, because he wasn't open to his mother, a woman who obviously cared about him and was seriously hurt by his actions.

But I don't think all of this story is just about Louie's relationship with his mother and daughters. A good portion of it is just a good old-fashioned story about what it's like to be a boy on the cusp of being a "man", and I don't know that I've ever seen an episode of television that deals with the strange mixed messages you receive at that age as well as Into the Woods does. Louie is told it's time for him to step up and start "being a man", but when he actually has to do that, he really has no fucking clue. And the fact that it all feels so big and cinematic - right down to Jeremy Renner kissing a cat! - only adds to the power of the story, even if it's about a seemingly far away event in Louie's life. While previous seasons of Louie were mostly just about Louis CK doing whatever the fuck he wants to do, this season seems insistent on showing us just how every element of Louie's life has impacted who he is today. It's an incredibly interesting departure for the show, and I can't wait to see where it all ends up next week.