No wonder Louis C.K. took a year to produce his latest season of “Louie.”
Every few episodes unfold like a little movie, with the deadpan flavor of 70s independent film. After the Hungarian romance, he embarked in a long reverie of his character’s youth in a pair of episodes that, clocking in at 66 minutes screen time, added up to 90 full minutes with commercial.
It may be little occasional outbursts that create controversy, from the fat girl rant to some sexual bullying of an ex last week. But it is on lengthy multi-part episodes, such as “In the Woods,” parts one and two, where C.K. is devising his season long inquiry into divorce and its effects on children.
Not comedy material? Maybe, but some of the most humane and effecting television that, due to casting and direction, add up to one of the most affecting and realistic recent coming of age meditations on or off the big screen.
The episode begins at an outdoor concert Todd Barry has dragged him to. Soon after Louie makes two observations: People are smoking pot in public these days, and that particular crowd is full of awfully young girls.
The next thing, he sees his own daughter, Lily, the one who has been seen as level-headed compared to the younger one who’s been acting out with friends, about to light up a joint. She’s only 12 years old.
As a dad, Louie can hardly contain himself. He charges over and pulls her away and is about to give her a big lecture until she says “What do you know about it?”
Well, we are about to learn, quite a lot.
We flash back to ninth grade Louie, brilliantly played by pale, tousle-haired redhead named Devin Druid, a typical kid, bullied by others, interested enough in science to let a teacher light his fart to illustrate a point.
When his little friend (Cory Nichols ) shows up with a joint at a school dance, it changes the whole direction of his life. Soon, the bully –Oscar Wahlberg (another Wahlberg!), the most convincing Boston kid on screen since Boston Rob – is among their little pot smoking posse, and Louie makes friends with a neighborhood dealer convincingly played by Jeremy Renner.
Already the cast has been convincing, with his mom played by Amy Landecker, who bears a striking resemblance to Lillie. And at one point F. Murray Abramson shows up as his father (after already been on the show as his uncle – there you have it: his dad and uncle were twins).
Stealing scientific scales to get bags of weed puts Louie at odds with the science teacher who has always been behind him. Even when the principal pulls him in the office to accuse him, the teacher leaps to Louie’s defense.
But things go wrong. His little friend’s parents find his pot and put him in private school; the bully gets arrested for slugging Ben and taking a bat to his car in retaliation; Louie gets yelled at by his mom and finally goes to the science teacher to apologize (if not promise to repay for the scales stolen).
In the end young Louie goes in for drug counseling, where the counselor says he took pot as a way to ease the pain of his parents’ divorce. Louie says no, the divorce didn’t affect him that way at all. And the counselor takes this as proof of how much it actually had affected him.
What may seem like a full-sized After School Special about pot adventure gone wrong takesover 90 minutes of what people expect of “Louie.” Not only is there no scene from a comedy club, there’s hardly any Louis C.K. either. Sometimes they cut to him before going to commercial, ruminating on this while cooking eggs for his daughter.
And when she wakes up, he serves her eggs, she waits for a lecture and he says: “I love you, I’m here, It’s all I got.”
It seems enough. He’s not hypocritical enough to yell at her when he went through the same thing. (It’s like the conversation I had with my stepson when it came to the drug talk. Mostly, I told him how time consuming it was.)
Louie also realizes her experimentation may also be because his own divorce. So they hug it out.
It’s more than you expect to get out of a couple of comedy episodes. But if all you want are laughs, there is one: A kid in the science class whose questions are only about farts.