Lucky Louie arrived in my life as a dream sequence. One day last year I had a vague memory of flipping through the channels and seeing a snippet of this really vulgar but hilarious sitcom filmed in front of what seemed like a live studio audience. It seemed like a false memory or a great dream, as where in the hell would I have seen something like that? NBC? CBS? ABC? Definitely not. So I passed it off as something that would be a really cool idea to do one day - that is, if I ever get off my ass and write that sitcom, try to get it picked up and then attempt to get the big wigs at NBC to let be as vulgar as what my imagination had seemingly conjured up.I came across a clip of Lucky Louie on Youtube and it all came flooding back: the sitcom was real and it was hilarious. Not hilarious in a Seinfeld or Arrested Development way, but in a way that is hard to define. It's not funny because it's vulgar; that's not the point. It's funny because it makes you question every sitcom line ever delivered from Lucy to Charlie Sheen. It's funny because it's the first and only sitcom that you'll ever see that literally could be your life that day. It's funny because while it's turning convention on its head and destroying decades of sitcom pap, it's doing it while in the guise of "filmed in front of a live audience" sitcom pap. Fast forward to now and me, being a huge fan of Louis CK stand-up and his Louis show, I started watched Lucky Louie. Lucky Louie as a sitcom makes more sense now then it most likely did back when it aired in 2006. To me, Lucky Louie exists outside our reality. It is a sitcom that would be playing on a TV in the background of Louis' current show. It pushes the boundaries of our television experiences and allows us to see how ludicrous "TV sitcom reality" really is. Sitcom reality is nothing like reality "reality" but Lucky Louie manages to be a bridge between what TV was/is and what it could/should be. The fact that it features many of the same actors as the current Louis show, makes the existence of the sitcom Lucky Louie even more "meta". It's extremely unfortunate that the sitcom only lasted one season. Many shows are touted as "ahead of its time" but Lucky Louie is ahead of its time by quite possibly centuries. I have no idea when or if America will be ready to see something as profane and funny during prime-time. I can only assume when that time comes, say, oh the year 2278, someone will say "Finally! A sitcom that really tells it like it is!" but someone will dig out Lucky Louie and say "Check this out. It's from 2006." And at that moment, history will recognize Louis CK's brilliance and he will become The Shakespeare of the future. I can only hope. Watch this show and watch Louis. They're a packaged deal.

This show was absolutely painful to watch. It just wasn't funny. What is so funny about two parents who can not deal with their child? Let's see, we have the token black neighbors, the idiots that Louie works with, and a host of worthless characters. Reruns of All in the Family would provide twice the humor. HBO has been known for quality programming and somehow this slipped through the cracks. Even OZ had more humor in it. If the desire to watch this show enters into your brain, just go down to the local funeral parlor check out the dead bodies. Just because someone can do stand up doesn't mean the it will translate onto the screen. Don't waste your time

I finished watching the first season of Lucky Louie this week, and to say the least I'm quite disappointed. It's not really awful but, oh, I don't know, it's so complicated. Louis CK is great, he's one of the greatest comedians I've ever seen. He's not much of an actor but neither is Jerry Seinfeld or Larry David or Mitch Hedberg, comedy is not necessarily about acting. So that aside, I'm still disappointed. It's like when you really love a band and know the tunes they put on that EP that probably sold about 20 copies and then they put out a full length (you know, something that will actually sell) and they put the same dam songs on it. And you wonder, why did you do that? I thought we were moving on, you've recorded this before. that's what watching the only season of Lucky Louie is like if you've seen all of his stand-up repeatedly. I haven't seen his new stand-up special, I'm sure it will be great, but Lucky Louie is nothing more than a complete season of acting out his old, old comedy routines. Which is good, at times, like when he is explaining his nightmares about Hell in the confessional to the father. Priceless. But that only really takes you so far before you say, wait a second the premise of every episode is that he's left in charge of his daughter, he messes it up, his wife gets mad, they make up, everyone is a better person, until next episode when it all begins again. The show is fine, its humorous, but it isn't original, its a little redundant, it lacks the creative spin on traditional topics like marriage and kids that Louis CK made his name on. Worth a viewing, if nothing else, so that you know why HBO pulled the plug on a show that had great potential and just had not come into it's own yet.

Everybody I've shown this to in the UK loved it. Probably the most refreshing true to life dialogue in a sitcom out there. It brought up comedic scenarios that no writer has ever dared to touch before. I can't believe HBO cancelled. If you look at how crap early episodes of Sienfeld were and how it only really became "good" from season 6 you'd have thought HBO would have shown a little more faith - this had the potential to become an all time classic! In fact if you look at many classic sitcoms (in the UK anyway) the most successful were often ratings failures first time out and strong word of mouth or a late spike in the ratings of the last couple of episodes persuaded the broadcasters to show the whole series just a few weeks later. But I digress - getting back to Louie: The one thing I loved about this show was how it seemed to revel in being non-PC whilst appearing not to "revel" - there was an almost unabashed pride in showing real life, warts and all. I hope it gets picked up here.