Even HBO makes mistakes

HBO's latest original series, the half-hour comedy Lucky Louie, premieres tonight (and repeats throughout the week) and it's a rarity for the network: it's really awful.

Sure HBO has had an occasional trainwreck in its past (Arli$$ and The Mind of the Married Man come to mind), but for the most part even its "failures" (like say K Street or The Comeback or Carnivale) are still interesting in some way. Lucky Louie does have an interesting concept: it's a "traditional" sitcom with a studio audience, laugh track, spare sets and a blue collar family at its center, but since this is HBO the writers are free to use as much "colorful" language and tackle whatever "adult" topics they want without resorting to innuendo or double entendres. Unfortunately the execution is as painful as any other generic network sitcom and the pilot episode plays something like an especially vulgar episode of According to Jim.

There was reason to expect more. Series creator and star Louis C.K. has a resume that includes writing gigs for David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Chris Rock and this show does air on HBO. But in watching it it's hard to understand why, this show is unreasonably bad for such a high quality network. There's a feeling of desperation here that would be more at home on Showtime. Not only is the writing not funny but the acting is terrible (only Mike Hagerty, as Louie's best friend, displays decent comic delivery) and the look of the show is appallingly bad. To top it all off the first episode runs a painful 31 minutes, an excrutiating amount of time to spend on not being funny (without commercials most network sitcoms are about 23 minutes long). The second episode is shorter at least, if not any funnier.

Several critics have already done an excellent job eviscerating the show (especially Tim Goodman in the San Francisco Chronicle) and I'd rather not spend any more time on it. Instead I'd rather write about something good (maybe the new season of Deadwood, which I haven't started watching yet), so I'll be back with something better soon.