Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Stream On |
|
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
It remains, as ever, a wholly original concoction that’s a thing of odd beauty.
-
Louie begins Season 5 in great and oftentimes phenomenal shape.
-
The FX comedy’s fifth season reveals a show that is as confident and distinctive as ever, a sitcom that is not quite like anything else on television.
-
This is a show that has taken the comedic rhythms of TV to a different level, that moves at the slower, more intimate pace of an independent film.
-
Where The Comedians feels forced, Louie is at once more natural and more surreal--and one of the best comedies on television.
-
The show feels more thematically, almost philosophically, confident this year.
-
Louis CK is a great comic actor, writer and director. The character of Louie is exquisitely crafted in his creator’s mind and on the page long before he delivers his lines. It’s insufficient to call Louie an everyman. He is far more complicated than that, and far funnier as well. If Sam Beckett were still around, he’d be rolling in the aisles.
-
The fantasy sequences and flashbacks are gone, with the show instead focused fully on awkward situations, mix-em-ups and conversations so serious they can either break your heart or crack you up.... Watching Louie means looking at the world through C.K.'s eyes; and through his eyes, the world is never boring.
-
Most importantly, the show is terribly funny this season. Louie is back at the top of its game.
-
Deliberately or not, the show throttles back on the experimental narrative arcs; fans of the early seasons might be relieved to see Louie is once again mostly about a single father and stand-up comedian and some of the people he knows.
-
It's a funny show, fundamentally, but not always, by intention. Not everything works, or works equally well; like Louie, Louis is only human.... Louie is a thought process made flesh.
-
The confidence and adventurousness of Louie‘s experiments are still present, but reined in and focused.
-
Featuring wild swings in tone, Louis C.K.’s deeply personal, frequently melancholy vision of life opens with what amounts to a mini-masterpiece of awkwardness, then proceeds to deal with his ongoing peculiar romance, a troubled friend and finally an unexpected encounter that’s both raw and disturbing. Almost nothing else on TV--certainly in half-hour form--rivals the particularity of C.K.’s approach.
-
The turmoil of such [relationship] arrangements, the anxiety and surprising limitations of being personally unbound by societal norms, has been a key part of Louie's inimitable perspective since its inception; here this anxiousness stirs up new perspectives on Louie's ability to forgive and his unique style of courting.
-
Even in a “laugh-centric” season that should appeal to a slightly bigger audience, it’s not the jokes that stick with you.
-
Tragedy is hard, comedy harder, while mixing both together seamlessly is just about impossible week after week. That Louie usually succeeds is a minor miracle. That it doesn't always is inevitable. Thursday's opener, "Potluck," has a funny twist but ends up in a strange, bitter place--even by Louie standards.
-
[The first episode] seems to prefigure a humdrum season of more conventional, gag-based humor, but beneath its self-contained farce the episode actually complicates C.K.’s pet themes in small, potent ways. And it’s ultimately a perfect setup for the story arc that follows in the next few episodes.
-
The viewer simply has to accept that he knows where his comedy is going, and that while his standup has punch lines, the humor in his sketches often stems more from a cumulative impression than one-liners along the way.
-
C.K. doesn’t even seem to be placing much value on eliciting guffaws during the stand-up segments that used to give his show a jolly lift at the beginning and end of each half-hour. Interestingly, over the course of the first four episodes I’ve seen, the warmest vibes emanate from Pamela.
-
The new season is a more straightforward affair over all, reminiscent in tone and structure of the show’s brilliantly mordant first three years.... As Louis C.K. reinvents the classic sitcom in his own elliptical, cerebral style, he seems to be in his absurdist theater phase, or his surrealist short-story phase--Kafka on the Hudson. (Louis C.K. still writes, directs and edits every episode.) At that level of ambition, some things work and some don’t.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 130 out of 148
-
Mixed: 6 out of 148
-
Negative: 12 out of 148
-
Apr 26, 2015
-
Apr 11, 2015
-
Apr 10, 2015This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.