MTV’s Jersey Shore and FX’s Louie are both currently airing in the 10:00 PM ET hour on Thursday nights, and the strength of their ratings could not be more disparate. For the new episode two weeks ago, Jersey Shore had almost 7.5 million viewers, making it the highest-rated show of the night on cable, with 3.7 million of those viewers coming in the coveted 18-49 demographic (the other 3.8 most likely came from endangered souls under 18). Meanwhile, Louie, which aired two new episodes that night, had only 733,000 viewers, with 400,000 of those coming in the 18-49 demographic (the other 333,000 viewers most likely are enlightened souls over 50, like my dad), but I could not find the ratings of the second episode. I bring up this comparison for a couple of reasons. One is to marvel and shudder at the power of Jersey Shore still going strong in its fourth season when the creators and stars are so obviously becoming more increasingly desperate to keep their fame and money train rolling by switching the setting to Italy. People who know me know how I feel about Jersey Shore as someone who was born in New Jersey and who loved vacationing to the Shore as a child, so I won’t bother to elaborate. The other more important reason I bring up this comparison of ratings is to both understand why more young people do not watch Louie and to appeal to them to do so, and I will cite the episodes that aired that week to show them what they are missing (mainly because I still have not caught up with the most recently aired episode, and will not be able to until next week’s new episode airs because FX doesn’t put their shows up on demand until then for some strange reason).
Before I go into what makes these particular episodes of Louie so fantastic, I want to establish a base of understanding for those who might be interested in watching the show. It is a semi-autobiographical portrait of Louis C.K., the highly respected standup comedian who writes, produces, edits, and directs every episode. The show, like Seinfeld, frames scenes of C.K. doing standup within the stories in the episode. Some of these episodes have one narrative that encompasses the entire half hour, such as the one featuring Joan Rivers earlier this season, but most of them have two stories that each take up about half of the episode and are almost totally unrelated to one another, such as one involving a flashback to Louie filming a sitcom and in the other story, he appeals to Dane Cook for Lady Gaga tickets for his daughter’s birthday. Many of the episodes are incredibly funny and crude, but some are also quite dark and remarkably poignant, which brings me to the two episodes I would like to discuss.
The first episode, titled “Come On, God,” falls squarely in the category of funny and crude. Louie goes on Fox News to defend masturbation against Ellen, a very attractive woman who is a spokesperson for Christians Against Masturbation. After a very heated debate in which Louie grows increasingly incredulous at this woman for her beliefs, he reluctantly accepts an invitation from her to go to a meeting for her organization, but not before he goes home that night and tries to masturbate to a woman he’s imagining in an elevator. After he attends the CAM meeting, he goes out for drinks with Ellen and then goes up to her hotel room, where she gives a very passionate and rational speech about why she is against masturbation. The episode is peppered with incessant dick and masturbation jokes that appeal to the teenager in all of us while simultaneously shooting at a target that all liberals love to make fun of, evangelical Christians.
While “Come On, God” is an episode of Louie that has a more traditional sitcom plot, the following episode, “Eddie,” operates in much darker and complex territory. The plot of the episode involves the reunion of Louie and his old friend Eddie, whom he had not seen in twenty years. The two were up-and-coming comedians together who were really close until Louie achieved a modicum of success while Eddie continued to tour the country doing small-time gigs. Eddie certainly looks worse for the wear, but Louie decides to hang out with him anyway, and after an episode at a liquor store and a random venture into an open-mic night in Brooklyn where Eddie does a very funny routine under a foul-mouthed alias, the two are standing at Eddie’s car, which he’s now living out of, and Eddie tells Louie something nobody wants to hear. Eddie is going to kill himself. He has no money, no family, no security in any aspect of his life, and he just wants to drink himself to death. Louie finds himself facing the difficult dilemma of whether to let Eddie end his own life or convince him not to. For a show that is considered to be a comedy, Louie is unafraid to deal with very serious issues in the most uncompromising fashion. We are not supposed to feel one way or the other about Eddie. While suicide is universally frowned upon, Eddie actually makes a compelling case for why he should not be alive, and Louie wrestles with his preconceived feelings about suicide with Eddie’s sound reasoning.
These two episodes are perfectly representative of why more people my age should be watching this show instead of that soul-sucking cyst of entertainment better known as Jersey Shore. Even though a lot of the comedy in the show is about Louis C.K. dealing with being middle aged and a divorced father of two, it does not mean that he is not a relatable character for young people to grow attached to. What makes Louis C.K. such a fascinating subject for television is his ability to tackle all issues that he faces in an honest way, even though the situation itself might be absurd, a common occurrence on the show.
Another key reason that Louie appeals to my generation is the show’s incredible ability to be self-aware. A great example of this postmodern trait of self-awareness is his meeting with Dane Cook in an episode I briefly referred to previously. Cook, one of the most popular and simultaneously reviled comedians of all time, has been accused in the past of stealing jokes from Louis C.K., and these accusations have hurt what was once a career destined to launch him into the stratosphere of movie-star comedians. In the scene where the two speak, Cook finally gets the chance to defend himself, not just against Louie, but against all of the people who accused of stealing jokes. The scene was most likely scripted by C.K., but both actors appear honest enough in their convictions that the audience actually believes that this conversation these two guys are having is not just a scene in a television show, but a real honest-to-goodness heart-to-heart where two men are trying to resolve a long-standing conflict between them. It is one of the more remarkable things I have ever seen on television because both men are just self-aware, but painfully so to the point where I find myself sympathizing with Dane Cook, which makes Louie an even more remarkable achievement as a piece of entertainment: a show that can make audiences view taboo things such as masturbation and Dane Cook in a whole new light. I know that asking young people to use their brains while watching television is a potentially fruitless request, but I want to make it anyway in support of this show, because people might be surprised by what they find.
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