Louie season 4 just kicked off with episode 1, titled “Back.” Our recap breaks down the events of the premiere!
This recap will be filled with spoilers, so don’t read on unless you’ve seen the episode or just like to live dangerously.
Louie is almost always filled with the bizarre, so when the synopsis for episode 1 read, “Louie has a typical day,” it was interesting to think about what that could mean. After viewing the episode, it’s easy to figure out just what Louis C.K. might be saying here (he almost always has some underlying message in his show): normal days are filled with abnormal things, and that’s what makes them normal.
The narrative part of the episode opens with Louie waking up to garbage men making as much noise in the street as possible and eventually coming into his bedroom and clanging the metal cans against everything in his house. That is, as we all can attest at some point, exactly how it feels to be trying to sleep through loud noise, whether or not we’ve all slept in a city as constantly loud as New York City or not.
From there Louis C.K. sets up a completely normal day for Louie. Some of the things Louie encounters here that his real life counterpart probably sees all the time are random people like the maintenance man in his apartment building telling him jokes and sometimes doing it incorrectly, fellow comedians telling him he’s not funny and jokingly insulting his kids, trying to help his kids with homework assignments that don’t matter, having to do certain things to get his kids to sleep, and having perverse conversations with fellow comedians.
After these conversations, Louie wonders if getting a vibrator could also help him in achieving better orgasms in his masturbation sessions, so he heads to a sex shop. While he’s there his back goes out. Stumbling out of the shop, he only makes it back to his apartment building after a little old lady helps him across the street and into a taxi.
Once there, he meets with the doctor, who happens to have his office in Louie’s building. The doctor tells Louie that nothing can be done for his back and that back problems will always exist because human backs aren’t meant to walk upright. It’ll take “about 20,000” years for backs to evolve to where they’ll exist largely without pain. The receptionist then suggests Louie use a vibrator on his back, so he goes back to the shop and buys one.
The stand up portion is always a highlight of the show, and as great as his contemplation of life and what comes next bits are, his “Life is short if you’re a child who died” bit will probably be in the running for one of the funniest he uses all season.
All in all, it was a very solid premiere. It’s hard to know what the overarching direction of season 4 will be, but it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Louis C.K. investigate the abnormalities in life that are frequent enough that they then become normal, as that’s what a show set in a realistic (but not real) world like Louie can do.
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