From Late Night With Conan O'Brien to The Dana Carvey Show to Pootie Tang, comedian-screenwriter-director Louis C.K. has a history of getting involved in projects that initially fail, then go on to attract cult followings. This pattern seems destined to repeat itself on his recently cancelled HBO sitcom, Lucky Louie, a profanity-laced throwback to working-class '70s Norman Lear sitcoms: Lucky Louie sharply divided critics and audiences, and earned its star the public condemnation of everyone from Catholic League president William A. Donohue to Barbara Walters, who expressed her outrage before C.K.'s appearance on The View. The A.V. Club recently spoke with the cult comedian—whose latest HBO special, Shameless, debuts on DVD June 26—about Lucky Louie's sad demise, mixing it up with Barbara Walters, the politics of television, the Eric Rohmer remake he co-wrote with his friend Chris Rock, and duck vaginas.
The A.V. Club: What's the humor in Shameless like?
Louis C.K.: It's a very mixed special. I talk about my wife and kids a lot. I defend a woman's right not to blow her husband. 'Cause who'd wanna blow their husband? You'd wanna blow a date, or a dude who picked you up and is wearing a nice shirt and said something funny. But you don't want to blow a guy and then go to Ikea with him and argue in the aisles. So I've started to understand my wife's side of the story. But I also talk about going to Chinatown and seeing duck vaginas in a big barrel and being afraid to eat one, because I don't want to find out that I love duck vaginas and I gotta have them, and at 4 o'clock in the morning, I'm having a craving for duck vaginas, and Chinatown's closed, so I have to go to a dark park with a knife.
AVC: How did The View initially approach you to come discuss Lucky Louie? Did they say "Barbara Walters has seen your show, she thinks you're the antichrist, you're vulgar, and we'd like to have you on so you can defend yourself"?
LCK: Oh no. Wouldn't that have been nice, if that's what they did? I actually reached out to them, because I had been on the show before. Joy Behar used to do a thing called "Comedy Corner," where you'd sit with her and she would set you up and you'd do your jokes. They asked me to do that a bunch of years ago and I said no, because The View is not my crowd. But the producer of the show called me at home and said, "What are you doing Tuesday that you can't take a town-car and just go be on a ladies' TV show?" So I said sure, and I did it, and I had a great time. The thing about the audience there is, they're very enthusiastic, positive people. And I like ladies. I like all ladies of all different ages. Ladies 40-plus, they're a great target for Lucky Louie. They come up to me in droves on the streets. That's a big demographic of who comes up to me to say they love my show, these older ladies.
So I said, "Let's get on The View," and we called them, and they said sure. The producer told me, "Oh we got the tapes, and the shows are great. It's a great show, it's going to be so much fun, we're excited about it." And then I get there, and I meet Fonzie. He loves the show, and everybody keeps coming—people with headsets and in suits and clipboards keep coming by my dressing room to say that they just love the show. And then the segment producer comes in my dressing room and says, "Okay. I have to talk to you. It turns out Barbara and the ladies didn't really watch it 'til last night, and they were horrified, and Barbara's going to say something about it in her 'Hot Topics' moment." Then she turns on the fucking monitor and I'm watching her, live, saying that it's a terrible show. So it was a bit of a sandbagging. I didn't expect it.
AVC: It wasn't just her saying, "I watched your show, it's not really my cup of tea," it was her saying it's vulgar, it's disgusting what your character does with his wife, the whole idea was sexist and racist…
LCK: Yeah, that made me really mad. She said that, and they told me this before, too, that her objection to the show was that we're having sex and my wife looks bored. This is what's fucking wrong with cunts like her, is that she thinks women should be depicted, you know, the way my wife on the show makes fun of. Like, with her hand on her head, "Oh, it should be romantic." And the idea of letting a woman—and, by the way, it's her story, it's the wife's story—letting her show what it's like to be bored in bed with your husband and trying to find something in bed without cheating on him, like fucking Desperate Housewives and all these whorish shows that people like Barbara love… They love shows about cheating, they love soap operas, and on the segment before me, they're telling women how to eat malnourishing food while keeping their figure. I mean, it's just all so obscene to me. They do nothing for women, and then she goes and calls [my show] sexist. And yeah, we do an episode where we confront race, and we talk about the awkwardness of race relations, and she calls it racist. So inside, I was shaking. I was like, "I fucking hate her right now."
I remember hearing from somebody who worked on All In The Family, that they went on the air and were going down fast. It was a disaster. Then the New York Times wrote a two-page article about the importance of the show, and that saved them. Nobody stepped forward and said, "Hey! Say what you might about the show, something important is going on here." Nobody did that. I mean, The New York Times gave us a fucking great review, but nobody cared. So did The L.A. Times, and so did fucking what's-his-name from the Washington Post who's very hard.
AVC: Tom Shales?
LCK: Tom Shales really liked it. He said great things about it. He said almost nothing negative.
AVC: When you were coming up with the show, did you have an inkling that it would be so divisive, that people would love it or they would think it was signaling the decline of Western civilization?
LCK: I thought people would get upset. I thought Bill Donahue would get upset and people like that, but I didn't think we'd get such wrath from certain reviewers. The thing is, comedy's gone in a weird direction. People are really into ironic comedy and fakeness and cleverness. Every show is fucking with you on some level. And our show wasn't. Our show was totally sincere. I think that some people didn't see it that way. I remember reading one reviewer who was just aghast that we weren't a meta-sitcom. He so wanted us to be a meta-sitcom, and he was just writing, "You really are just telling these stories? I mean, you can't do that." And then there's other people that misread the sets being very spare, and the show looking like an old sitcom. They thought we just had a poor designer, as if HBO would let us do a show where we just didn't do a good job. It's like the best-looking network in the history of television, as if they would put out a show that looks spare and theatrical just because they were sloppy.
So I think some people just didn't know what to make of it. But we had some very great reviews from great places. There's two kinds of press that you get when you put out a TV show: The reviews, and the people that just decide what the reviews say. If we got four great reviews and three bad reviews, then somebody just has to write "the beleaguered Lucky Louie, which was a critics-hated show," and it actually wasn't. But people started writing that right away, and then it becomes a fact.
Perception is created and twisted so quickly. I don't complain about this, by the way. This is the landscape the show existed in. That's just the way it is now. Failure comes fast and quick now, on TV. So I'm pretty philosophical about it. I knew we would get into trouble, but I did think we would have lots of fans. And the thing that is very frustrating is, the show got very good ratings. People would just say "It's not getting good ratings," but it was. I mean, in the world of HBO, obviously not against Two And A Half Men, but as a start-up series, we were doing fantastic, and we were getting higher ratings every week. The only weeks where we went down, the whole lineup went down, because of football. And we would go down less than Entourage. We were beating Deadwood in the ratings. It just all happened a little too quickly. We didn't have time to turn perception around.
AVC: Why did the show get cancelled so abruptly? What was HBO's rationale?
LCK: It's hard to say. I didn't ever get a really straight answer, because everybody I deal with at HBO was very positive about the show, all the way up to our recently departed Mr. Albrecht. Chris [Albrecht] called me during the summer while we were waiting, and said "Don't worry. This is taking a while, but HBO is having money trouble with Warner Bros. this summer." They were having trouble making any pickups. And he told me this. He said "We're having money problems," and The Sopranos, what's his name, James Gandolfini hurt his knee. There was all this shit that happened to HBO all at once. He said, "I'm confident we're going to pick you up, but I can't say for sure, and we just have to wait 'til this stuff blows over." In the meantime, they ordered eight additional scripts. They paid us to write eight episode of Lucky Louie, which we wrote, and they even floated my writing staff, the entire staff, which is very unusual. Usually, when you get additional scripts with no production commitment, you just write it on your own. But they let me have a writing staff for another month, to create these eight scripts. And they also threw money at me and my partner over the summer, just to keep us from getting other jobs. They just kept giving us money.
AVC: It seems like HBO is largely going for prestige with its shows, more so than ratings.
LCK: Absolutely.
AVC: Do you think part of it might have been class-based, that maybe they viewed a Lucky Louie viewer as less desirable than somebody making $150,000 a year who loves Sex And The City?
LCK: I think that's absolutely true. And that's also what made the reviews a little tougher for us, because the expectations people bring to a show is a big part of how they enjoy it, or don't. So people tune into an HBO show expecting to have their eyebrows up, and to be proud to tell everybody how they got it. It wasn't that kind of show. We were going for very gut laughs. We were going for "Oh my God!" type of laughs. This was a very pyrotechnical show, comedy-wise, and they were not expecting that.
There are people in certain parts of comedy that get embarrassed when people are laughing really hard. They get upset. People got upset about our audience being on the track, even though I put in that old, '70s "Lucky Louie was filmed before a live audience," so it would be clear to people that this was not a laugh track. This was an untouched audience reaction. But people just wrote about a laugh track, a fake laugh track. They wrote it as if it was a fact, without checking, even though it said that on there. You can't say that. It's illegal to just lie.
AVC: In the audio commentaries, you're very critical of single-camera, no-laugh-track shows.
LCK: Which is one way to go. I'm just tired of single-camera. I mean, I'm talking as the guy who did that show. It's now a couple years since I shot it. I was a little tired of the whole, "Somebody says something embarrassing, and the other people look embarrassed, and then cut." It's gotten really hacky, I think. It's the same in every show that comes out now. I hadn't seen a series that really succeeded at being a live-form show, the way All In The Family was, the way that Ralph Kramden did. You just don't see that any more.
AVC: It's become sort of the shorthand for sophistication, earned or not.
LCK: Right. It's just that some people did it. I don't know. To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't. At the end, they usually say, "By the way: not for me." But reviewers now just go, they're like bloggers, they go, "Ha ha hi. Don't bother seeing this, it's shit. Trust me, it's crap. I like this show. That show I just saw sucks. Fuck you. And by the way, I ate a muffin today."
AVC: Do you think Lucky Louie would have been better received if it had been shot single-camera, no live audience?
LCK: Absolutely not. I think that would have been a completely different show. This was just a very specific thing, a performed sitcom, where the audience reaction mitigates the performance, where it isn't a film that's guided by the editing and the direction and the placement of the camera. That's a whole other world. I didn't let the director bury the cameras deep into the stage. He had to stay back and film it, like a basketball game. He'd say, "I can only see one eye of the person." I don't give a shit. I don't want to have to stop so you can move a camera and then start again and take all night to shoot the show. I want the audience to… because I had Jim Norton, who's a comedian, Laura Kightlinger is a comedian, Pam Adlon, who played my wife, is a fucking electric performer. You take a performer of a certain kind and you put an audience in, and it changes everything. It changes how the momentum of a scene goes, if they start saying something and you feel the audience hitch onto it, it kicks you into a higher gear. There's just a million things that change when you have an audience.
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