In Which We Decide To Become An Actress Living In Los Angeles

Afternoon Audition

by ELEANOR MORROW

Loosely Exactly Nicole
creators Christian Lander & Christine Zander
MTV

Better Things
creators Louis CK & Pamela Adlon
FX

Every single person faces the prospect of reincarnation. When we emerge into our second lives, we live either in Van Nuys or Silverlake and go to endless, disappointing auditions. Such is the subject of two new television series, FX's Better Things and MTV's Loosely Exactly Nicole.

The latter features a ubiquitous presence on MTV of late, comedian Nicole Byer. It is not hard to figure out why the network is so high on her, since Byer is probably the most charismatic performer they have by leaps and bounds. Loosely Exactly Nicole details her life with roommate Devin (Jacob Wysocki), a massive gay man who has a natural rivalry with Nicole's other best friend Veronica (fellow standup Jen D'Angelo).

The three of them spend a very serious amount of time talking about men, but it is all talk: even though Nicole's boyfriend Derrick (Kevin Bigley) features on occasion, he is more just a stationary penis for Nicole to ride during the evenings. During the day, she is a nanny for a Taiwanese kid (Ian Chen), who she takes to her auditions if it seems absolutely necessary.

Loosely Exactly Nicole is the first show to make life in Los Angeles seem the least bit bearable. At times the production seems like it occurs in a series of parking lots; even the scenic park where Devin goes to reunite with a standard-looking white guy from his past looks like dogshit. This seems a conscious choice to make Nicole stand out even more from the world around her. It turns this MTV series into an inspiration, aspirational project for young people: simply by being fabulous you can ascend above your shitty surroundings, wherever they may be.

Nicole goes on various tinder dates since her thing with Derrick is more of a friends-with-benefits type situation. On one such meet-up, the white man informs her not to get another drink unless she plans to sleep with him. (He had spent too much money this week.) This is the most agency any straight white man shows on Loosely Exactly Nicole; this species is basically a blank canvas for Devin, Veronica and Nicole to project themselves onto at intervals.

Despite a relatively memorable physical form, Byer is so much more of a chameleon than you would think. One episode has her changing hairstyles, and it takes this small cosmetic change to show off what astonishing range she truly has as an actress. The writing on Loosely Exactly Nicole never lets her down: it is consistently hysterical. Watching Amy Schumer after watching this turns Amy into a parody of itself, since all of Byer's sex commentary is so much dirtier and true-to-life. It will be very difficult for a stronger comedy to emerge from this fall season of television.

Better Things, the apology project from Louis CK after he masturbated in front of all those women, does not benefit from this comparison. Pamela Adlon plays herself as Sam, a Los Angeles-based voice and television actress who unlike Nicole Byer lives in a beautiful home with her wonderful children. It is pretty unclear why Adlon is so unhappy. If she actually had to lead Nicole Byer's life, my guess is that she would drown herself in the La Brea tar pits.

It made sense when Louie was whiny and annoying since the theme of his show was what an entitled prick he was to everyone in his life, at all times. Adlon has a similar perspective on her life, except we are supposed to sympathize with her completely. Louie was also painfully short on actual love stories and geniune connections with people. Better Things features Pamela Adlon obssessing over a guy from her past who texts her that he is thinking about her:

This eerie anxiety when the ellipsis indicate the other party is typing on their iPhone is the kind of soft touch Adlon & CK bring to some of Better Things' more intimate moments. The show falters the most when brings Adlon into broader, showbiz comedy, like a scene where Bradley Whitford performs fake cunnilingus on her. That sketch falls so flat that it makes me wonder whether the half-hour format really suits what they were trying to do here.

Better Things is so much less interesting when Adlon not-so-hilariously fuming at the clerk in a drugstore or complaining about the teacher of her children. Sam's three daughters are very young, with her oldest, Max (Mikey Madison), just entering her teen years. Max asks her mother to get her pot, a suggestion which is met with complete disdain and utter rejection, even though it is honestly didn't seem that crazy 20 years ago, let alone now, for a kid whose mother is an actress living in this house:

Adlon's actual ex-husband lives in Germany and does not have much of a relationship with his children. We get some sense of how isolating that is for her, and yet the real Pamela Adlon seems like so much more of a happy person than Sam. When it is most predictable, Better Things feels like a televised spin-off of Bad Moms, even though Adlon does not really do anything very questionable with or around her children. She is mostly just sad, depressed and exhausted. It is maybe not the best sign for a comedy that it is most compelling without the jokes.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan.

In Which Chip Baskets Has Lost A Considerable Amount Of Body Fat

Renwah

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Baskets
creator Louis CK, Zach Galifianakis & Jonathan Krisel

Chip Baskets' mother (Louis Anderson) has these plants in her house with large fronds. She won't trim them because it would be like doing harm to something she loves, no matter how much they get in her way as she attempts to ascend the stairs of her home. This is the kind of compassionate, dispassionate attitude assumed by virtually everyone in the brilliant new FX series Baskets, except for its central character: a California clown named Chip Baskets (Zach Galifianakis). Unlike the rest of the people in his life, he knows exactly who he is.

Chip's identical twin brother Dale runs a correspondence degree mill that pumps out certificates in occupations like middle management and cell phone repair. He is used to his brother coming to him for money, and doesn't really resent the imposition. Chip asks him for $40, money he plans to use to fund the HBO subscription of a French woman who no longer has any interest in him.

Louis CK recently released the painful first episode of Horace and Pete, a three camera comedy that stars himself and Steve Buscemi as white brothers running a bar. You can feel CK's presence in Baskets, but it is more in the subtle diassociation from reality.

CK has not received enough credit for bringing some of the character of live theater to television; in Horace and Pete this melding such a disaster the show feels like a parody of Death of a Salesman. On his own HBO series, Louie, this unique feel to the television product made it seem vaguely otherworldly, and the same effect is achieved by the marvelous Baskets.

Chip Baskets' world is Bakersfield, California, which consists of the places he ventures as he rollerblades from the rodeo to his home base and back again. He only goes somewhere else when he is escorted, since he cannot afford a car and a bee caused him to crash his scooter.

Galifianakis is at his best when he is not playing too weird. The fact that he is about half the man he once was made him look like a turtle without his shell in recent performances. By now we are used to the slimmer version. At base, Chip Baskets is the kind of good-natured simpleton, but Galifianakis plays Chip with a depth the character sorely requires and maybe does not deserve. As Chip fails out of French clowning school because he amusingly speaks no French whatsoever, we have quickly finished sympathizing with his naivete: the man is no charity case, he simply needs to figure things out.

To set him on the garden path, his mother purchases him a Costco executive membership from Chip's only friend, a woman named Martha (Martha Kelly). The role of Chip's buddy is written exactly to suit the stand-up comedian, whose deadpan, unenthusiastic delivery never exactly made her a roaring hit onstage. Some of the ways Chip dismisses Martha seem a little too pat, but Baskets works better as a personal journey rather than a love story anyway. Chip responds well to Martha's understated nature and tries to ape it in his clowning, and eventually in his life.

Although Chip performs at a rodeo, lots of obvious jokes are avoided in favor of more personal storylines. In the show's second episode, Chip takes an interest in the clowning career of a Juggalo (Adam William Zastrow) with no experience in the art. Through Chip's intervention, the young man is able to pursue a fruitful career as a cashier at Arby's. Amidst the dark humor involved with Chip's maudlin existence in Baskets, there is an inspiring undercurrent about what positive things we can absorb from other people without even meaning to do so.

This is maybe not the hilarity audiences would expect from Zach Galifianakis as a clown, but who cares? There has not been a comedy as good as Baskets on television for a long time. Watching other comedies becomes the observation of a race towards a singular joke. Once achieved, the entire paradigm is thrown away for some other gag. Angie Tribeca, a horrid series which recently premiered on the equally unwatchable network TBS, at least attempted to turn this into a Mel Brooks-type zaniness.

Unfortunately Mel Brooks is not funny unless you are under ten years old or substantially more interested in puns than you ought to be. Rashida Jones is wasting her career as the titular detective, and honestly she was never really cut out for these sorts of gagfests anyway.

What comes across in Baskets is the same sort of basic humanity that is represented in everything Louis CK admires. He honestly appears to respect regular people a lot more than he does his actual friends and peers, so he casts them in the roles of working class individuals. Horace and Pete descends too far in this direction; it is too obvious that the entire cast not who they appear to be. The show even makes Rebecca Hall resemble a regular person, forcing her to kiss Louis CK on the lips as part of the show's opening moments. Although this dull sense of normalcy is more deftly done in Baskets, on the whole this humbling is a welcome change.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

"You're Mine" - Lola Marsh (mp3)

In Which You Begin To Grasp His Unique Pain

The Great White Male

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Louie

creator Louis C.K.

It's hard to be a white man. Pale skin glittering in the sun, your garden variety of white man is twice as susceptible to skin cancer as his peers. If he walks into someone's grotto, he's expected to know what a grotto is and remark, "What a lovely grotto!" He can't enjoy the comedy of Tyler Perry and anytime Will Ferrell cries, he's expected to laugh.

This is the basic premise of Louis CK's new show, Louie. Victimhood never know its name until it met the comedian, whose divorced life as a New York City stand-up is the inspiration for the show. CK's live-studio audience HBO sitcom Lucky Louie was canceled a few years ago despite being the first convincing television show about people below the poverty line since Friends went off the air.

Lucky Louie was half-Roseanne and half a desire to put something on television that hadn't been there in decades or more. Louie and his nurse wife (writer and comedian Pamela Adlon) lived in a two-room apartment with their daughter and had regular problems. CK and Adlon's most famous bit was a ten minute essai on the perils of anal intercourse. What made Lucky Louie such a mindtrip was that something about it was transparently false, just as most of it was frighteningly real:

Lucky Louie was canceled after one season just as it had begun to find a real audience. Ultimately HBO higher-ups felt the working class vibe of nowhere, Massachusetts didn't fit into their Entourage profile, and that's a shame because the show's language was so explicit it could never have survived on any other network.

CK turned down other offers to make the Louie pilot for $200,000 because FX gave him full control. As he recalled:

I went [to Hollywood] and I had other networks offering me a lot of money to do a pilot, and I got this call from FX and they said 'Well, we can't offer you a lot of money, but if you do the show for us, you can have a lot of fun.' He was offering me $200,000 as the budget for the whole pilot and I was like 'So what do I get paid?' and he was like 'No, that's the whole thing, $200,000...' I said 'Look, the only way I'm doing this is if you give me the $200,000 - wire it to me in New York - and I'll give you a show. But I'm not pitching it, and I'm not writing a script and sending it to you first.'

The end product Louie is likely to become the success that Lucky Louie wasn't. Although the comedian's childhood in Massachusetts under less than ideal circumstances was cinéma vérité enough, that isn't the person he's become. CK is more comfortable as an asshole, not because he really is one but because he finds it the only reaction to the world that subjugates and humiliates him whenever it can. If you can understand how a popular comedian with a television series can feel discriminated against, you're about halfway to describing how infectious the political mood in this country is right now.

Fame changes people, and CK is no exception. The difference is that he believes he's a nice guy. The show's placid opening tells all — in the show's title sequence, he emerges from the subway like a regular guy, eats a slice of pizza before his show like a normie, and goes to his job. There's a pretension of drudgery that he loves associating with stand-up comedy, and in a recent episode he addresses how humiliating he finds being a comedian. "All these guys, their lives suck," he tells a heckler after his set, indicating a group of white male comedians. "The fifteen minutes they spend on stage are the only time they get to be in charge, and you took that away from them."

As in Larry David's comedy, minorities are CK's favorite foil. After awhile, you discern that it has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with him. He thinks he's one of them — that he knows what it's like to be black, or hispanic, or a woman. And then he sets out to convince you that there is something in common, until he totally undermines that perspective. One of the show's funniest moments had CK chaperoning a bunch of students and getting stuck on a bus in Harlem. His first act was to tell all the black students to take the window seats. "That's horrible," his co-chaperone tells him. "I know," he says.

Once political correctness held a lot of sway in this country's day-to-day affairs. This is no longer precisely true, but for the white comedian it is the most serious form of opprobrium. And yet, when CK has fellow comedian Nick DiPaolo insult Barack Obama, Louie almost gets in a fistfight defending the honor of the president. This was his way of making sure we knew that he is a liberal. Otherwise, his jokes about homosexuals doing it wrong and black people not tipping enough don't seem as enlightened.

If he could, Louis CK would himself be a minority. He has a long writing relationship with the comedian Chris Rock, and his 2001 directorial debut Pootie Tang was a bizarre satire of blaxploitation films, which always seemed like a strange contrast to the reality of his stand-up. Of the incredibly weird end result, Roger Ebert wrote, "This film is not in releasable condition." In his new show, he turns away from what he believes himself to be, and focuses on what he is: a divorced father of two who only becomes older, fatter, and more repulsive to friends and family by the moment.

Above all, Louie's main concern is his own physical appearance. Half his comedy revolves around convincing the audience how disgusting he is. One vignette had him approached by an attractive young women who fetishized just how old he was. As she had sex with him, she continually cried out, "You're so old" until the point of orgasm. Until last year, Louie was married to New York artist Alix Bailey. His stand-up has never been very complimentary towards his now ex-wife, who he seemed to regard as an extension of his own self-loathing.

All the authority figures in Louie are older men, who he regards with a mix of suspicion and disgust. Besides his agent, Louie also takes advice from his senior therapist (David Patrick Kelly), who has the advantage of being even more misguided than he is. Like astral projections, these figures seem to taunt Louie into believing that they are an entity he might someday become. The idea that he will be a wrinkled old bigot like all the older men he knows is a strong reminder to himself to stay engaged with the present, lest he become stuck in past time like his crone of a mother.

While Louis CK's early comedy was largely observational, that's not the most accurate term when what you're observing is your real life, your existence with a wife and two daughters. Last week's Louie revolved around the hatred of his own mother (the transcendent Mary Louise Wilson). His daughter asks him, "Why do you love her?" and he finds he can't think of an answer. (So far his ex-wife has been politely excluded from the show, a strange move from someone who gets a lot of mileage onstage from executing sacred cows.)

Still, it seems that Louis CK does enjoy something about the one part of his life not entirely consumed with self-analysis: his time with his two kids. When a PTA-acquaintance (Adlon) and her son visit his New York apartment for a playdate, the two parents discuss what the most horrible thing they've ever thought about doing to their kids is. Louie can barely think of anything. In fact, his daughters are the only people on the show he has a nice word for. Everyone else is terribly misguided or judging him so harshly that he puts his gee-shucks look on his face and pouts through the rest of the episode.

The comedian's recent stand-up special Hilarious is the first film of that kind to be accepted at Sundance. Yet Louie feels that if he thinks of himself as successful, he'll lose the sharp edge of his comedy. It's true what he tells his heckler, though. Onstage is where CK has all the power. You can see how comfortable he is there; his shoulders are wide and proud, and he's never apologizing there, only seeking to explain something he can never tell the other people in his life. He is hurt, simply by being who he is.

It was inevitable that white people would start thinking of themselves as victims at some point. In four American commonwealths they are already a minority, and no amount of immigration reform or restriction of birthright citizenship is likely to change that. And so what if they feel persecuted because of the color of their skin? For everything there is a season.

The political movement that has sprung out of this feeling has itself little to do with race — the race of the president or the race of the whites fleeing from his bandwagon. The last president to make white people feel powerful was, of course, Ronald Reagan. Unlike the current talk of hard choices and important sacrifices, Reagan's great insight was that he'd be reelected if he stressed that America would be fine.

Louis CK doesn't feel it's going to be okay. Half the time he indicates how powerless his surroundings make him feel. Even when he's powerful, the attitude is pervasive. After his ancient Jewish agent tells him he's secured him a part in Matthew Broderick's all-Jew remake of The Godfather, CK politely refuses the part, sending the man into a fatal heart attack. Instead of being amazed by his own power, he shuffles out of the emergency room, the victim of another humiliation. Like the mass of white male voters, he doesn't realize he's the one in control.

It is almost impossible for one person's comedy to continue to break new ground, but there has never been anything on television like Louie and it's doubtful there ever will be again. At its best moments Louis CK's comedy has no fear at all in depicting people and situations perilously true to reality but never before brought to living rooms. The day-to-day sufferings of wealthy white males are thankfully never without voice. Then again, there's something a little comforting in knowing that he too suffers.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.

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