Why Louie is the next stage in the evolution of the TV sitcom
Television shows that blow apart the rules only come along in a genre every 20 years or so. The last TV sitcom to rip up the playbook and start over was , which was vaguely recognizable as the same sort of show as, say, The Cosby Show, but also seemed so unlike anything that had come before that it took TV (and viewers) a while to catch up to its innovations. …That evolutionary impulse led to other shows that realized eliminating the multiple cameras and studio audience Seinfeld still had to use would speed up the pace and allow for even more jokes. Something like Arrested Development or Community might seem wildly different, but tracing those shows’ evolutionary roots backward inevitably stops at Seinfeld or The Simpsons.
This isn’t really the case with Louie. There’s really been nothing else like it in the history of television, and it seems likely that as the decades roll on, more and more shows will be influenced by its blend of cynical comedy and genuine pathos, as well as its deeply personal worldview.
