SOS
06-09-2006, 06:29 AM
These reviews should be read by those who are not easily influenced. This thread will be here so watch the Lucky Louie show at 10:30 PM Sunday on HBO before reading.
Star Ledger (http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/114965974994750.xml&coll=1)
Funny business
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
A FATHER sits at the kitchen table with his adorable 4-year-old daughter, who wants to go play outside at 5 a.m. The father says they can't, which triggers 14 or 15 consecutive "Whys?" from the daughter, as the soundtrack fills with nervous laughter.
This is a new ABC sitcom, right? Fox? Maybe something the WB is dumping on the airwaves before the network ceases to exist?
http://ads.nj.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/www.nj.com/xml/story/star_ledger/co/colatv/@StoryAd?x (http://www.wackbag.com/) Unfortunately, this is "Lucky Louie," HBO's attempt to do a traditional sitcom shot on video in front of a studio audience. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether the cable channel is looking to change its motto to, "Hey, you know what? It really is TV."
Louis C.K., a comedian who's written for "Saturday Night Live" and "The Chris Rock Show," plays Louie, a mechanic who works part-time because wife Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on "King of the Hill") makes more money and gets benefits from her nursing job, and because somebody has to watch little Lucy (Kelly Gould).
Throughout the early portions of "Lucky Louie" (Sunday, 10:30 p.m.), I kept wondering if it was a spoof, someone's idea of what a three-camera sitcom might look like on HBO: cheap punchlines mixed with four-letter words, stock situations given an R rating.
And yet, after a while, I found myself warming, however slightly, to the show. If nothing else, I admire its honesty. Kim and Louie seem genuinely poor (their apartment is a dive with no decorations and rotting walls), instead of the usual TV conception of poor where you get to have a giant loft apartment in Soho.
And after years of watching one awful sitcom after another try to ape "Seinfeld" or "Friends" with some kind of s......ing double entendre or innuendo about something they can't sneak past the censors, it's almost refreshing to hear certain activities described in the plainest (and crudest) manner possible. When Kim catches Louie doing that thing that put George Costanza's mother in the hospital, or when he realizes she only wants to have sex to get pregnant, there's no pussy-footing around the topic, no smirking attempt to prove just how clever the writers can be at avoiding an FCC fine.
(On the other hand, a little honesty can go a long way; a later episode features three fairly graphic, albeit non-nude, sex scenes between the couple. Between those scenes and Vito's leather get-up on "The Sopranos," I'm thinking about filing a lawsuit against HBO for emotional battery -- that or I'm filing a workman's comp claim for post-traumatic stress disorder.)
But while I'll admit the bluntness of "Lucky Louie" made me laugh more than, say, your average episode of "George Lopez," there's still no excuse for its being on HBO. Despite the "Deadwood"-esque language, its rhythms are too conventionally sitcom-y, and the occasional chuckle isn't worth the long painful patches. The opening "Why?" scene with Louie and Lucy plays out like one of those Letterman running gags that starts off funny, then gets annoying, then becomes so annoying that it's funny again -- only it's never, at any point, funny.
Ever since "Sex and the City" left and "The Sopranos" approached its own end, HBO has been going through a mid-life crisis, the sort that usually leads to flashy sports cars and hair plugs. Those two shows raised the bar almost impossibly high for a pay cable outfit, and you can see the channel casting about in search of something the audience may want to watch nearly as much as the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano. Elaborate period dramas haven't really worked; neither have inside-showbiz comedies.
The Sun (http://www.nysun.com/article/34143)
HBO Finds a Way To Curb Enthusiasm
Television
By DAVID BLUM
June 9, 2006
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http://www.nysun.com/advertising/adview.php?what=zone:9&n=a577d051 (http://www.nysun.com/advertising/adclick.php?n=a577d051) For those few hardy souls who hold out hope for the future of situation comedies taped in front of a live audience, the highly anticipated debut of HBO's "Lucky Louie" this Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. will not prove to be a memorable landmark, except as a low point in the history of HBO. What was supposed to be a bold venture by the top programmers in the television business has turned out to be yet another lifeless assortment of sex jokes for the studio audience's titillation - the only variant being the foul language that adds specificity, though not humor, to the cause. Unlike its most obvious inspiration, "Everybody Loves Raymond," this is a multi camera family comedy that parents should shield their children from at all costs.
The premise of "Lucky Louie" draws heavily from "Raymond," which itself descended directly from the great marriage comedies of the 1950s and 1960s that once dominated television. Classics like "The Honeymooners" showcased needy losers and their strong, acerbic wives in relationships shaped by wit and love. The formula evolved and prospered for decades (most recently with hit shows like "Raymond" and "The Simpsons") as comedy writers explored the transformation of the American family, and embraced the values that endured. But in the case of "Lucky Louie" - in which unlucky Louie (Louis C.K.) works in a muffler shop while his sharp-tongued wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon), has a better-paying job as a nurse - nothing but sex seems to matter. Even "The Flintstones" played more with the subtle dynamics of marriage than this off-putting enterprise does.
In the first episode of "Lucky Louie," the show's executive producer and creator, Louis C.K. - who also plays the title character - sets up the ostensible thread of the first season: His wife wants to have a second baby, a desire that sets off a midcourse assessment of the troubles in their sex life. The pilot - which opens with a hilarious and endearing dialogue between Louie and his 4-year-old daughter - veers sharply off course when it delves into Louie's use of a closet to masturbate, and the implied rejection of his wife that his habit creates. It's an area that was already dealt with - and far more amusingly - on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
Once the couple has finally moved forward with their plans to conceive in Episode 2, we get to see them actually having sex on screen (not a pretty sight), which results in Kim's first real orgasm. In truth, it's a funny enough premise, and it would have been interesting to see how a subtler show might have played with it. But on "Lucky Louie," we're witness to Louie acting like a goofy teenager who just copped his first feel. When asked by his next-door neighbor what he was thinking about when he gave his wife the orgasm - don't even ask how that conversation came to pass - Louie utters a vile and unprintable insult about his wife. It's the sort of comment that would have gotten Ray mond Barone served with divorce papers, and deservedly so.
By the end of the third episode, in which a friend of Louie's has an unexpected heart attack, you'll be amazed (and nauseated) by how many different ways the show's writers manage to relate every plot point to sex. Because this is HBO, such mentions often come with visual and verbal shocks - from the sight of Louie's penis to the use of language never before spoken in front of a live television audience. It's all done in the name of humor, but cursing stops being truly comical after the fourth grade. Here it becomes a tool for violence and distance; every time Louie and Kim swear at each other, it puts them at odds in an irreconcilable way. There's no moment in the first three episodes when you can see what brought these two together, or what keeps them a couple.
For all those who keep mourning its imminent demise, there's still great hope that the half-hour comedy will continue to mature. HBO deserves much of the credit for that, with its support in recent years for innovative shows like "The Larry Sanders Show," "Sex and the City," and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." But in this effort to move the multicamera sitcom forward into a new era, HBO has stumbled badly. The channel that changed television forever has reversed direction, delivering an obscene and outdated take on the medium's most enduring classics. Discerning viewers - and that comprises virtually anyone who pays the premium for HBO programming each month - will quickly and resoundingly reject "Lucky Louie."
newsday (http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/ny-ettvtwo4773012jun09,0,1937525.story?coll=ny-television-headlines)
REVIEW
Everybody probably won't love Louie
BY DIANE WERTS
STAFF WRTIER
June 9, 2006
Now we know why live-audience sitcoms run just 22 minutes and sidestep wanton swearing and sex. Discipline improves the product.
Exhibit A: HBO's new "Lucky Louie," which does neither and suffers the less-than-hilarious consequences.
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There's still something about the Much-Maligned Formula that simply clicks, given talent, commitment and creativity. Exhibit A: "Everybody Loves Raymond," which followed the basic rules yet felt fresh and crisp, thanks to its emotionally rooted characters and sharply observed situations. "Raymond's" subtle writing even managed to be adult without being coarse or offensive.
In "Lucky Louie," HBO attempts to reinvigorate the live-audience format by pushing graphic bedroom situations, man-talk cursing and explicit sex talk, without an equal level of explicit craft behind it. Louis C.K., one of stand-up's main men, goes down for the count as a muffler shop mechanic forever desperate to get some from his wife, an overworked nurse (Pamela Adlon). As if that weren't enough, he's also trying to make "a black friend" in his new apartment-house neighbor, a ham-handed subplot straight from Archie Bunker's era.
Sunday's pilot actually starts off promisingly, with a two-hander between Louie and his 5-ish daughter - a "Why?" assault from her that has him confessing his drug-addled youth, deconstructing the service economy and wryly concluding, "God's dead, and we're alone." The scene neatly sets up the show's situation, while teasing a depth of comedic character too rarely revisited. Instead, we're hurled easy masturbation jokes, tasteless sex tales from the guys at the shop and family friend Laura Kightlinger making love to a roast at the grocery store. Wife yearns for another baby, but Louie pleads being broke in such excessive observations as "Your [genitalia] is a chamber of financial ruin." It takes 31 minutes to deliver this.
Men are pigs also resounds as the theme next week, which adds several awkward sex scenes and attendant toys to the litany of four-letter words, five-letter words and 12-letter words. There's certainly comedy to be found in these basic situations, but not in "Lucky Louie's" confounding approach or stilted presentation. Louie's mostly a lug, and his guy pals range from self-interested to despicable. The women talk dirty the way men wish they did.
Too bad. This could have been a welcome return to the "Roseanne" real world of plain people feeling trapped in workaday lives. "Louie" gets the look right, shooting on videotape that details use-scarred walls and the lines on tired faces. But the "comedy," unleavened by the rethinking of restraint, gets simply in-your-face, not in your brain or emotions. Lucky isn't the word that comes to mind.
LUCKY LOUIE. HBO tackles the sitcom. The sitcom gets sacked. Series premieres Sunday night at 10:30.
calendarlive.com (http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-comedy7jun07,0,4093903.story?coll=cl-tvent-util)
http://www.calendarlive.com/images/standard/empty.gif June 7, 2006
TELEVISION REVIEW
Funny how HBO has changed
By Paul Brownfield, Times Staff Writer
Dane Cook is a comedian for these "American Idol" times: youthful, accessible and karaoke-good. His dead-on rendition of an exciting new headliner (circa 20 years ago), coupled with Brad Pitt looks (for a comic) and Internet savvy (www.myspace.com/danecook, with his 1,138,772 "friends"), propelled him into a development deal with HBO, a relationship whose latest outing, premiering at 11 Sunday night, is "Tourgasm."
"Tourgasm," a reality-type show in which Cook goes on the road in a rock-star bus with three lesser lights, is certain to excite the young fans who sent his "Retaliation" CD soaring up the charts and leave everyone else behind. If you're among the stranded, it isn't you — or wait, sorry, I'm afraid it is: Cook is as bulletproof among fans as he is unspectacular to anyone who's watched much comedy in the previous two decades.
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You should double-check this, but I think HBO once broke emerging comics as artists, not as audience-pleasers who were destined to please the next audience. But the pay cable network is coming off a season of arch, Hollywood-insider comedies such as "The Comeback," which not only failed to catch on but also made the network seem dangerously removed from the mainstream. That trend now lurches in the opposite direction: HBO evidently is eager to co-opt Cook's new-media viability as much as Cook wants the cred that HBO conveys. For Cook, it's not TV. For HBO, it's not TV, either. It's iTunes.
"Tourgasm" is the Sunday nightcap in a block of new comedies that includes the third-season debut of "Entourage" and the premiere of a sitcom called "Lucky Louie," starring another comedian, Louis C.K., who previously wrote for "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" and "The Chris Rock Show."
If "Tourgasm" is steeped in VH1, both "Entourage" and "Lucky Louie" exude that old HBO counter-network-intuitiveness, at different extremes: "Entourage" is basically "Friends" with Hummers, while "Lucky Louie" attempts to repudiate all that "Friends" did to the sitcom in the first place.
"Lucky Louie," about a young couple with honest money troubles, is harshly lighted, and it has the studio audience and laugh track; it feels as if you've happened across a British sitcom or a rerun of "MADtv."
Louie is a part-time mechanic in a muffler shop, and his wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on "King of the Hill"), is a full-time hospital nurse. The supporting cast of misfits, used unevenly so far, are unwashed types normally relegated to guest-star status (Michael G. Hagerty, for instance, was the occasionally seen apartment superintendent on "Friends," but here he's Louie's best friend who cracks weary-wise and smokes cigarettes).
Kim takes the bus to work, and Louie wears T-shirts that have shrunk and faded in the laundry. The sets on "Louie" suggest a decaying burg — doughnut shop, fenced-in playground, check-cashing place.
This all makes it a rarity, socioeconomically; most network shows, post-"Roseanne," uniformly abandoned portrayals of the lower-middle class — the expression "blue collar" becoming network shorthand for anything that wasn't like "Frasier."
"Louie," then, recalls the era of "Sanford and Son," "All in the Family" and "Good Times." This is HBO chasing itself by the tail, for wasn't it "Sex and the City" that ushered in glossy, single-camera quasi-sophistication, which in turn balkanized the multi-camera family comedy as red state?
"Louie's" opening scene is an intentionally stock network sitcom tableau: kewpie-doll kid, sardonic dad are at breakfast, the 4-year-old Lucy (Kelly Gould) peppering her father with cute-as-a-button inquisitiveness, questions ranging from why is it still dark outside to why didn't dad pay attention in school.
The first answer ("the Earth goes around, and when it turns a certain amount the sun shows on the horizon") sets up the comic release of the second one ("Because I was high all the time. I smoked too much pot").
It's the kind of line that doesn't make it out of the writers' room on network shows, where tradition has long held that sitcom folks sit in a room all day, unfurling obscenities in order to arrive at the compromised line that gets to the stage. It's why a writer's assistant on "Friends" sued for sexual harassment but didn't win, the California Supreme Court affirming last April that writers' room vulgarity was reasonable on a show in which "explicit sexual references typically were replaced with innuendos, imagery, similes, allusions, puns, or metaphors in order to convey sexual themes in a form suitable for broadcast on network television."
No such shell game is needed on "Louie," which is free to swear and abuse this privilege but is actually pretty judicious (when Louie refers to his wife's privates, the actual word is less funny than its metaphor as "a chamber of financial ruin"). In the pilot, Kim catches Louie masturbating, which leads to a renewed commitment to have sex, which leads to Louie discovering Kim wants to get pregnant again.
"Do you know how much we have in checking? Negative $50," Louie tells her about the risks of bearing another child. "We have to raise $50 just to be broke."
More than the raunch — which keeps migrating to broadcast, anyway — this is what makes "Lucky Louie" interesting. It dares to utter that eight-letter word: "checking."
"Tourgasm" takes place in an America we don't see, either, but this is because we're locked inside a bus with four guys mugging at a hand-held camera. It's "Entourage" on the cheap, without the fun stuff — Ari's showy rants or Drama's neediness — and with even less at stake.
The comics that make up Dane Cook's touring posse — Jay Davis, Gary Gulman and Robert Kelly — convey the same airborne sense of sponging off of a star that Vince's buds exude. Off the bus, they play with toys; on the bus, they sleep, fart and discuss porn. Here's what HBO hates to hear: It's been done before, and funnier, on Comedy Central's "Comedians of Comedy," for one.
Cook is very likable, very high energy, and he has all the well-minted comic's moves down pat — the sound effects, the jumping about, the patter. It's as a persona that he stands out — the rock-star following, the comic as Smashing Pumpkin.
But the world at large doesn't tax him; finally, in Episode 3, I saw him crack a USA Today (the Life section). No wonder: His material (not that you see much of it) is about things like car crashes and fast-food drive-thrus and how there's always that one friend in a group that nobody else likes.
On "Tourgasm," Cook is working the college circuit, where a comedian might chance to discuss the war in Iraq. But he's an embodiment of the depressing axiom among comics that nothing bums out an audience faster than politics (except for comics like Lewis Black, whose newest HBO special, premiering Saturday, is called "Red, White & Screwed").
Funny, this aversion to the world outside his bus, because Cook is at least partly a politician, shaking each and every hand and signing each and every bra and responding to each and every instant message from fans, having blazed a trail for himself with his hit website.
"Tourgasm" is about two things," he tells the camera, in a moment of reflection after the show at Sonoma State. "It's about comedy and our love for comedy and our passion for getting up and entertaining … people, and it's about finding your voice, and sharing your life with other people."
His legion all know the back story behind his hand signal, the Su-Fi. It's all kind of Scientology-seeming on the one hand, but ingenious and adaptive on the other: The jokester as your Friendster.
USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2006-06-08-lucky-louie_x.htm)
HBO's 'Louie' more lousy than lucky
Updated 6/8/2006 11:23 PM ET
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
HBO's luck has run out.
Once seen as a televised art house, thanks to series such as Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, HBO has discovered the downside of early success: You're expected to replicate it. Instead, the pay service has ceded ratings and creative ground to basic cable through a string of failures including The Mind of the Married Man, The Comeback, Carnivale, K Street and Unscripted. Even HBO's better series, The Wire, Deadwood and Entourage, can't approach the ratings of The Sopranos, which disappointed fans itself by ending an unpopular season with a finale most didn't think was final enough.
So you can see why HBO would attempt to break its pattern by doing something it has never done: a traditional studio-audience-style sitcom with an only-on-cable adult twist. The smarmy result is Lucky Louie (Sunday, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT), a show so vile, it makes you think the company's arrogant It's Not TV — It's HBO slogan isn't a brag — it's a threat.
Created by and starring writer Louis C.K., Lucky Louie follows the adventures of a lower-class, blue-collar couple living in a ramshackle apartment. The plots revolve around family sitcom favorites, such as Louie's wife's desire to have another child — only in this case the focus is on the act of procreation rather than the result. Sorry, but adding nudity and profanity to old jokes, old situations and old fights doesn't make them new or better or, in this case, amusing. It just makes them unpleasant.
What's offensive about Louie is its condescending insistence that working-class couples never get their minds out of the bedroom and their mouths out of the gutter. Some of the sex scenes themselves actually are funny, in an incredibly crude way. But when two women have a graphic discussion of their sex lives in a supermarket aisle, you know it has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with Louie's desire to shock. All it does is repulse.
There's no profanity on Louie you won't also hear on HBO's returning Deadwood (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), but in Deadwood, the words serve artistic purpose. Coupled with the characters' poetic if somewhat impenetrable syntax, the language separates us from these Wild West residents, and them from their more settled, civilized contemporaries. For all the artificiality of the language, there has seldom been a show that felt more authentic.
Considering Deadwood is returning in excellent creative form, you'd think people would be focused on the episodes ahead. Instead, HBO allowed word of the show's cancellation to precede its return, stirring up a firestorm that forced the network to commission two story-concluding movies.
Which means the only undulled bright spot in the Sunday lineup is the remarkably sweet-spirited Entourage (10 ET/PT), which returns for a third season with funnier episodes and higher stakes, as Vince awaits the results of his big movie premiere. These are wildly over-privileged people partying through a world few of us will ever glimpse, and yet they feel more like three-dimensional, likable human beings than Louie's maniacally cursing cartoons can ever hope to achieve. It's amazing what better writing and acting can do.
Yet HBO is wasting this lead-in on Lucky Louie. That's not bad luck. That's just sheer stupidity.
And that, sad to say, often is TV.
Posted 6/8/2006 9:26 PM ET Updated 6/8/2006 11:23 PM ET
LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-comedy7jun07,0,2947120.story?coll=la-home-entertainment)
Boston (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/06/09/hbo_banks_on_the_boys_with_a_trio_of_comedies/)
HBO banks on the boys with a trio of comedies
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff | June 9, 2006
Call it ``guys' night in." On Sunday, HBO begins a new programming lineup featuring a bunch of porn-using, attention-loving, curse-inventing, beer-belly-bearing dudes. Sure, these men bust each other plenty, but they always hug it out -- with conspicuous non sexual back pats, of course.
With Tony Soprano and his crew weakening and then departing in 2007, HBO is declaring a new demographic war on young men. This summer, from 9 to 11:30 p.m. on HBO's most valuable night, you'll find a sort of Howard Stern - flavored sundae with Vince Vaughn sprinkles on top. Look for the good (``Entourage"), the bad (``Dane Cook's Tourgasm"), and the ugly (``Lucky Louie"), all airing right after the return of HBO's most brilliantly artful of stinky sinkholes, David Milch's ``Deadwood."
Seriously, you wouldn't want to do laundry for the HBO men, who now include the comedian Louis C.K., a one-time Boston boy. His explicit sitcom, ``Lucky Louie," premieres in the 10:30 slot, and it's one of HBO's more fascinating series -- but not because it's good, or funny.
It's actually a failed experiment in TV genre, and a reminder of the power of the unspoken and the unseen in entertainment. When you can swear like a sailor and simulate love making openly in an old-fashioned sitcom, as the actors do on ``Lucky Louie," you don't generate much excitement or outrageousness. Often, shock depends on the forbidden for its ballast.
``Lucky Louie" is HBO's first-ever conventional multi-camera sitcom, complete with live audience laughter and a fake-looking set. It's the antithesis of the more sophisticated TV comedy that HBO has championed, from ``The Larry Sanders Show" to ``Sex and the City." But while ``Lucky Louie" mimics old-school sitcoms such as ``The Honeymooners," ``Roseanne," and ``The King of Queens," it's also frankly sexual. In tonight's episode, for instance, Kim (Pamela Adlon) catches her chunky lug of a husband Louie pleasuring himself in a closet. Next week, the series becomes even more unreserved, as the couple make love during a scene -- while exchanging quips, naturally.
Kim is a nurse who suffers Louie's quirks; Louie is a James Belushi type with a part-time job at a muffler shop and buddies with whom he can complain about women; and they have one adorable preteen daughter. They're just another working-class TV family, and if the same characters appeared on a network series they'd be definitively unoriginal.
On HBO, they're definitely unoriginal -- with sex. But let's be kind and say that Louie C.K. and HBO are ambitiously trying to usher an antique sitcom format into today's risque standards and see how it holds up. It's a study in cultural change. I don't think HBO would have anything to do with this lousy series if that weren't the agenda.
The masturbation content on ``Lucky Louie," so self-conscious and forced, made me think of the ``Contest" episode of ``Seinfeld," when the four friends competed to see who could refrain the longest. The word ``masturbation" was never used (according to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, NBC forbade it) and that fact made the half-hour funnier than ever.
``Will & Grace" also toyed successfully with ``dangerous" material, as the writers mustered their wit to make their sexual humor clear and yet stealth. Prudishness is boring, but pushing the envelope isn't fun when the envelope is torn wide open.
``Entourage" is compensation for ``Lucky Louie." Entering its third season Sunday at 10 p.m., ``Entourage" is the Hollywood satire with a heart. It makes good fun of movie-business self-importance and superficiality, in the way Fox's failed sitcom ``Action" did. But it also includes a collection of affectionately drawn characters whose successes and failures matter to us, and whose boyishness is amusing. The gang of five -- star Vince, brother Johnny Drama, dude-in-waiting Turtle, manager Eric, and agent Ari -- has jelled into a dynamic unit.
Based on the first three episodes, this season will add dimension to the characters, including Jeremy Piven's Ari, whose expanding sado-masochistic rapport with receptionist Lloyd (Rex Lee) has become one of the series' little gems. In the first episode, we meet the guys' moms, most notably Vince and Johnny's mother, when Vince tries to lure her to LA for the opening of his ``Aquaman." In a bit of perfect casting, she's played by Mercedes Ruehl. She's more like Johnny, with superstitions and competitiveness, but she probably doted on her baby Vince. Also, in episode 3, we meet one of the guys' buddies from Queens, as well as Ari's daughter's boyfriend.
The successes and failures of these guys -- and they are all guys, since female characters such as Debi Mazar's publicist get little attention -- has been a great device. They can never quite relax, because fame and money are so fickle and fleeting in Hollywood. Vince is only as good as his last movie, and if ``Aquaman" isn't a blockbuster, he, his friends, and Ari will be yesterday's news. And as long as they're on their toes, they're worth watching.
The oddest thing about ``Tourgasm," at 11, is that it's like a nonfictional ``Entourage." The docu-reality show follows four male comedians who live on a bus together as they perform around the country. Dane Cook has a Vince-like presence, since he is t he most successful and charismatic of the four. He's surrounded by Robert Kelly, Jay Davis, and Gary Gulman, each of whom has character traits similar to the guys in Vince's posse. As their customized ``Tourgasm" bus cruises along, they lose track of time and place, nerves go on edge, and mundane reality arguments occur.
And that's about it. We get snippets of the guys onstage at their gigs, but most of ``Tourgasm" tracks the morale on the bus. One minute, the porn jokes are flying, the next Davis is having a snit fit because he doesn't want to talk about porn. Whenever there is a clash, Cook jumps in as a peacekeeper, in case we didn't already know he's a nice guy. ``We've got to be the glue for each other," he tells the viewers.
But in trying to make the bus melodramas seem important, Cook stretches too far. This is a cross-country tour, something most performers have experienced, and there's nothing particularly special about it. Cook pretends that the bus dynamics are TV gold, but you can feel him straining to be convincing.
Cook is headed for greater stardom, for sure; just watch him dance around the stage as he pours out his stand - up material. He's a likable and formidable force. But ``Tourgasm" isn't going to get him to the top any faster. His show is too much like a dull season of MTV's ``Road Rules," without the women.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.
Star Ledger (http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/alltv/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/114965974994750.xml&coll=1)
Funny business
Wednesday, June 07, 2006
A FATHER sits at the kitchen table with his adorable 4-year-old daughter, who wants to go play outside at 5 a.m. The father says they can't, which triggers 14 or 15 consecutive "Whys?" from the daughter, as the soundtrack fills with nervous laughter.
This is a new ABC sitcom, right? Fox? Maybe something the WB is dumping on the airwaves before the network ceases to exist?
http://ads.nj.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/www.nj.com/xml/story/star_ledger/co/colatv/@StoryAd?x (http://www.wackbag.com/) Unfortunately, this is "Lucky Louie," HBO's attempt to do a traditional sitcom shot on video in front of a studio audience. It's the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether the cable channel is looking to change its motto to, "Hey, you know what? It really is TV."
Louis C.K., a comedian who's written for "Saturday Night Live" and "The Chris Rock Show," plays Louie, a mechanic who works part-time because wife Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on "King of the Hill") makes more money and gets benefits from her nursing job, and because somebody has to watch little Lucy (Kelly Gould).
Throughout the early portions of "Lucky Louie" (Sunday, 10:30 p.m.), I kept wondering if it was a spoof, someone's idea of what a three-camera sitcom might look like on HBO: cheap punchlines mixed with four-letter words, stock situations given an R rating.
And yet, after a while, I found myself warming, however slightly, to the show. If nothing else, I admire its honesty. Kim and Louie seem genuinely poor (their apartment is a dive with no decorations and rotting walls), instead of the usual TV conception of poor where you get to have a giant loft apartment in Soho.
And after years of watching one awful sitcom after another try to ape "Seinfeld" or "Friends" with some kind of s......ing double entendre or innuendo about something they can't sneak past the censors, it's almost refreshing to hear certain activities described in the plainest (and crudest) manner possible. When Kim catches Louie doing that thing that put George Costanza's mother in the hospital, or when he realizes she only wants to have sex to get pregnant, there's no pussy-footing around the topic, no smirking attempt to prove just how clever the writers can be at avoiding an FCC fine.
(On the other hand, a little honesty can go a long way; a later episode features three fairly graphic, albeit non-nude, sex scenes between the couple. Between those scenes and Vito's leather get-up on "The Sopranos," I'm thinking about filing a lawsuit against HBO for emotional battery -- that or I'm filing a workman's comp claim for post-traumatic stress disorder.)
But while I'll admit the bluntness of "Lucky Louie" made me laugh more than, say, your average episode of "George Lopez," there's still no excuse for its being on HBO. Despite the "Deadwood"-esque language, its rhythms are too conventionally sitcom-y, and the occasional chuckle isn't worth the long painful patches. The opening "Why?" scene with Louie and Lucy plays out like one of those Letterman running gags that starts off funny, then gets annoying, then becomes so annoying that it's funny again -- only it's never, at any point, funny.
Ever since "Sex and the City" left and "The Sopranos" approached its own end, HBO has been going through a mid-life crisis, the sort that usually leads to flashy sports cars and hair plugs. Those two shows raised the bar almost impossibly high for a pay cable outfit, and you can see the channel casting about in search of something the audience may want to watch nearly as much as the adventures of Carrie Bradshaw and Tony Soprano. Elaborate period dramas haven't really worked; neither have inside-showbiz comedies.
The Sun (http://www.nysun.com/article/34143)
HBO Finds a Way To Curb Enthusiasm
Television
By DAVID BLUM
June 9, 2006
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http://www.nysun.com/advertising/adview.php?what=zone:9&n=a577d051 (http://www.nysun.com/advertising/adclick.php?n=a577d051) For those few hardy souls who hold out hope for the future of situation comedies taped in front of a live audience, the highly anticipated debut of HBO's "Lucky Louie" this Sunday night at 10:30 p.m. will not prove to be a memorable landmark, except as a low point in the history of HBO. What was supposed to be a bold venture by the top programmers in the television business has turned out to be yet another lifeless assortment of sex jokes for the studio audience's titillation - the only variant being the foul language that adds specificity, though not humor, to the cause. Unlike its most obvious inspiration, "Everybody Loves Raymond," this is a multi camera family comedy that parents should shield their children from at all costs.
The premise of "Lucky Louie" draws heavily from "Raymond," which itself descended directly from the great marriage comedies of the 1950s and 1960s that once dominated television. Classics like "The Honeymooners" showcased needy losers and their strong, acerbic wives in relationships shaped by wit and love. The formula evolved and prospered for decades (most recently with hit shows like "Raymond" and "The Simpsons") as comedy writers explored the transformation of the American family, and embraced the values that endured. But in the case of "Lucky Louie" - in which unlucky Louie (Louis C.K.) works in a muffler shop while his sharp-tongued wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon), has a better-paying job as a nurse - nothing but sex seems to matter. Even "The Flintstones" played more with the subtle dynamics of marriage than this off-putting enterprise does.
In the first episode of "Lucky Louie," the show's executive producer and creator, Louis C.K. - who also plays the title character - sets up the ostensible thread of the first season: His wife wants to have a second baby, a desire that sets off a midcourse assessment of the troubles in their sex life. The pilot - which opens with a hilarious and endearing dialogue between Louie and his 4-year-old daughter - veers sharply off course when it delves into Louie's use of a closet to masturbate, and the implied rejection of his wife that his habit creates. It's an area that was already dealt with - and far more amusingly - on HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
Once the couple has finally moved forward with their plans to conceive in Episode 2, we get to see them actually having sex on screen (not a pretty sight), which results in Kim's first real orgasm. In truth, it's a funny enough premise, and it would have been interesting to see how a subtler show might have played with it. But on "Lucky Louie," we're witness to Louie acting like a goofy teenager who just copped his first feel. When asked by his next-door neighbor what he was thinking about when he gave his wife the orgasm - don't even ask how that conversation came to pass - Louie utters a vile and unprintable insult about his wife. It's the sort of comment that would have gotten Ray mond Barone served with divorce papers, and deservedly so.
By the end of the third episode, in which a friend of Louie's has an unexpected heart attack, you'll be amazed (and nauseated) by how many different ways the show's writers manage to relate every plot point to sex. Because this is HBO, such mentions often come with visual and verbal shocks - from the sight of Louie's penis to the use of language never before spoken in front of a live television audience. It's all done in the name of humor, but cursing stops being truly comical after the fourth grade. Here it becomes a tool for violence and distance; every time Louie and Kim swear at each other, it puts them at odds in an irreconcilable way. There's no moment in the first three episodes when you can see what brought these two together, or what keeps them a couple.
For all those who keep mourning its imminent demise, there's still great hope that the half-hour comedy will continue to mature. HBO deserves much of the credit for that, with its support in recent years for innovative shows like "The Larry Sanders Show," "Sex and the City," and "Curb Your Enthusiasm." But in this effort to move the multicamera sitcom forward into a new era, HBO has stumbled badly. The channel that changed television forever has reversed direction, delivering an obscene and outdated take on the medium's most enduring classics. Discerning viewers - and that comprises virtually anyone who pays the premium for HBO programming each month - will quickly and resoundingly reject "Lucky Louie."
newsday (http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/tv/ny-ettvtwo4773012jun09,0,1937525.story?coll=ny-television-headlines)
REVIEW
Everybody probably won't love Louie
BY DIANE WERTS
STAFF WRTIER
June 9, 2006
Now we know why live-audience sitcoms run just 22 minutes and sidestep wanton swearing and sex. Discipline improves the product.
Exhibit A: HBO's new "Lucky Louie," which does neither and suffers the less-than-hilarious consequences.
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There's still something about the Much-Maligned Formula that simply clicks, given talent, commitment and creativity. Exhibit A: "Everybody Loves Raymond," which followed the basic rules yet felt fresh and crisp, thanks to its emotionally rooted characters and sharply observed situations. "Raymond's" subtle writing even managed to be adult without being coarse or offensive.
In "Lucky Louie," HBO attempts to reinvigorate the live-audience format by pushing graphic bedroom situations, man-talk cursing and explicit sex talk, without an equal level of explicit craft behind it. Louis C.K., one of stand-up's main men, goes down for the count as a muffler shop mechanic forever desperate to get some from his wife, an overworked nurse (Pamela Adlon). As if that weren't enough, he's also trying to make "a black friend" in his new apartment-house neighbor, a ham-handed subplot straight from Archie Bunker's era.
Sunday's pilot actually starts off promisingly, with a two-hander between Louie and his 5-ish daughter - a "Why?" assault from her that has him confessing his drug-addled youth, deconstructing the service economy and wryly concluding, "God's dead, and we're alone." The scene neatly sets up the show's situation, while teasing a depth of comedic character too rarely revisited. Instead, we're hurled easy masturbation jokes, tasteless sex tales from the guys at the shop and family friend Laura Kightlinger making love to a roast at the grocery store. Wife yearns for another baby, but Louie pleads being broke in such excessive observations as "Your [genitalia] is a chamber of financial ruin." It takes 31 minutes to deliver this.
Men are pigs also resounds as the theme next week, which adds several awkward sex scenes and attendant toys to the litany of four-letter words, five-letter words and 12-letter words. There's certainly comedy to be found in these basic situations, but not in "Lucky Louie's" confounding approach or stilted presentation. Louie's mostly a lug, and his guy pals range from self-interested to despicable. The women talk dirty the way men wish they did.
Too bad. This could have been a welcome return to the "Roseanne" real world of plain people feeling trapped in workaday lives. "Louie" gets the look right, shooting on videotape that details use-scarred walls and the lines on tired faces. But the "comedy," unleavened by the rethinking of restraint, gets simply in-your-face, not in your brain or emotions. Lucky isn't the word that comes to mind.
LUCKY LOUIE. HBO tackles the sitcom. The sitcom gets sacked. Series premieres Sunday night at 10:30.
calendarlive.com (http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/cl-et-comedy7jun07,0,4093903.story?coll=cl-tvent-util)
http://www.calendarlive.com/images/standard/empty.gif June 7, 2006
TELEVISION REVIEW
Funny how HBO has changed
By Paul Brownfield, Times Staff Writer
Dane Cook is a comedian for these "American Idol" times: youthful, accessible and karaoke-good. His dead-on rendition of an exciting new headliner (circa 20 years ago), coupled with Brad Pitt looks (for a comic) and Internet savvy (www.myspace.com/danecook, with his 1,138,772 "friends"), propelled him into a development deal with HBO, a relationship whose latest outing, premiering at 11 Sunday night, is "Tourgasm."
"Tourgasm," a reality-type show in which Cook goes on the road in a rock-star bus with three lesser lights, is certain to excite the young fans who sent his "Retaliation" CD soaring up the charts and leave everyone else behind. If you're among the stranded, it isn't you — or wait, sorry, I'm afraid it is: Cook is as bulletproof among fans as he is unspectacular to anyone who's watched much comedy in the previous two decades.
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You should double-check this, but I think HBO once broke emerging comics as artists, not as audience-pleasers who were destined to please the next audience. But the pay cable network is coming off a season of arch, Hollywood-insider comedies such as "The Comeback," which not only failed to catch on but also made the network seem dangerously removed from the mainstream. That trend now lurches in the opposite direction: HBO evidently is eager to co-opt Cook's new-media viability as much as Cook wants the cred that HBO conveys. For Cook, it's not TV. For HBO, it's not TV, either. It's iTunes.
"Tourgasm" is the Sunday nightcap in a block of new comedies that includes the third-season debut of "Entourage" and the premiere of a sitcom called "Lucky Louie," starring another comedian, Louis C.K., who previously wrote for "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" and "The Chris Rock Show."
If "Tourgasm" is steeped in VH1, both "Entourage" and "Lucky Louie" exude that old HBO counter-network-intuitiveness, at different extremes: "Entourage" is basically "Friends" with Hummers, while "Lucky Louie" attempts to repudiate all that "Friends" did to the sitcom in the first place.
"Lucky Louie," about a young couple with honest money troubles, is harshly lighted, and it has the studio audience and laugh track; it feels as if you've happened across a British sitcom or a rerun of "MADtv."
Louie is a part-time mechanic in a muffler shop, and his wife, Kim (Pamela Adlon, the voice of Bobby on "King of the Hill"), is a full-time hospital nurse. The supporting cast of misfits, used unevenly so far, are unwashed types normally relegated to guest-star status (Michael G. Hagerty, for instance, was the occasionally seen apartment superintendent on "Friends," but here he's Louie's best friend who cracks weary-wise and smokes cigarettes).
Kim takes the bus to work, and Louie wears T-shirts that have shrunk and faded in the laundry. The sets on "Louie" suggest a decaying burg — doughnut shop, fenced-in playground, check-cashing place.
This all makes it a rarity, socioeconomically; most network shows, post-"Roseanne," uniformly abandoned portrayals of the lower-middle class — the expression "blue collar" becoming network shorthand for anything that wasn't like "Frasier."
"Louie," then, recalls the era of "Sanford and Son," "All in the Family" and "Good Times." This is HBO chasing itself by the tail, for wasn't it "Sex and the City" that ushered in glossy, single-camera quasi-sophistication, which in turn balkanized the multi-camera family comedy as red state?
"Louie's" opening scene is an intentionally stock network sitcom tableau: kewpie-doll kid, sardonic dad are at breakfast, the 4-year-old Lucy (Kelly Gould) peppering her father with cute-as-a-button inquisitiveness, questions ranging from why is it still dark outside to why didn't dad pay attention in school.
The first answer ("the Earth goes around, and when it turns a certain amount the sun shows on the horizon") sets up the comic release of the second one ("Because I was high all the time. I smoked too much pot").
It's the kind of line that doesn't make it out of the writers' room on network shows, where tradition has long held that sitcom folks sit in a room all day, unfurling obscenities in order to arrive at the compromised line that gets to the stage. It's why a writer's assistant on "Friends" sued for sexual harassment but didn't win, the California Supreme Court affirming last April that writers' room vulgarity was reasonable on a show in which "explicit sexual references typically were replaced with innuendos, imagery, similes, allusions, puns, or metaphors in order to convey sexual themes in a form suitable for broadcast on network television."
No such shell game is needed on "Louie," which is free to swear and abuse this privilege but is actually pretty judicious (when Louie refers to his wife's privates, the actual word is less funny than its metaphor as "a chamber of financial ruin"). In the pilot, Kim catches Louie masturbating, which leads to a renewed commitment to have sex, which leads to Louie discovering Kim wants to get pregnant again.
"Do you know how much we have in checking? Negative $50," Louie tells her about the risks of bearing another child. "We have to raise $50 just to be broke."
More than the raunch — which keeps migrating to broadcast, anyway — this is what makes "Lucky Louie" interesting. It dares to utter that eight-letter word: "checking."
"Tourgasm" takes place in an America we don't see, either, but this is because we're locked inside a bus with four guys mugging at a hand-held camera. It's "Entourage" on the cheap, without the fun stuff — Ari's showy rants or Drama's neediness — and with even less at stake.
The comics that make up Dane Cook's touring posse — Jay Davis, Gary Gulman and Robert Kelly — convey the same airborne sense of sponging off of a star that Vince's buds exude. Off the bus, they play with toys; on the bus, they sleep, fart and discuss porn. Here's what HBO hates to hear: It's been done before, and funnier, on Comedy Central's "Comedians of Comedy," for one.
Cook is very likable, very high energy, and he has all the well-minted comic's moves down pat — the sound effects, the jumping about, the patter. It's as a persona that he stands out — the rock-star following, the comic as Smashing Pumpkin.
But the world at large doesn't tax him; finally, in Episode 3, I saw him crack a USA Today (the Life section). No wonder: His material (not that you see much of it) is about things like car crashes and fast-food drive-thrus and how there's always that one friend in a group that nobody else likes.
On "Tourgasm," Cook is working the college circuit, where a comedian might chance to discuss the war in Iraq. But he's an embodiment of the depressing axiom among comics that nothing bums out an audience faster than politics (except for comics like Lewis Black, whose newest HBO special, premiering Saturday, is called "Red, White & Screwed").
Funny, this aversion to the world outside his bus, because Cook is at least partly a politician, shaking each and every hand and signing each and every bra and responding to each and every instant message from fans, having blazed a trail for himself with his hit website.
"Tourgasm" is about two things," he tells the camera, in a moment of reflection after the show at Sonoma State. "It's about comedy and our love for comedy and our passion for getting up and entertaining … people, and it's about finding your voice, and sharing your life with other people."
His legion all know the back story behind his hand signal, the Su-Fi. It's all kind of Scientology-seeming on the one hand, but ingenious and adaptive on the other: The jokester as your Friendster.
USA Today (http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/reviews/2006-06-08-lucky-louie_x.htm)
HBO's 'Louie' more lousy than lucky
Updated 6/8/2006 11:23 PM ET
By Robert Bianco, USA TODAY
HBO's luck has run out.
Once seen as a televised art house, thanks to series such as Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, HBO has discovered the downside of early success: You're expected to replicate it. Instead, the pay service has ceded ratings and creative ground to basic cable through a string of failures including The Mind of the Married Man, The Comeback, Carnivale, K Street and Unscripted. Even HBO's better series, The Wire, Deadwood and Entourage, can't approach the ratings of The Sopranos, which disappointed fans itself by ending an unpopular season with a finale most didn't think was final enough.
So you can see why HBO would attempt to break its pattern by doing something it has never done: a traditional studio-audience-style sitcom with an only-on-cable adult twist. The smarmy result is Lucky Louie (Sunday, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT), a show so vile, it makes you think the company's arrogant It's Not TV — It's HBO slogan isn't a brag — it's a threat.
Created by and starring writer Louis C.K., Lucky Louie follows the adventures of a lower-class, blue-collar couple living in a ramshackle apartment. The plots revolve around family sitcom favorites, such as Louie's wife's desire to have another child — only in this case the focus is on the act of procreation rather than the result. Sorry, but adding nudity and profanity to old jokes, old situations and old fights doesn't make them new or better or, in this case, amusing. It just makes them unpleasant.
What's offensive about Louie is its condescending insistence that working-class couples never get their minds out of the bedroom and their mouths out of the gutter. Some of the sex scenes themselves actually are funny, in an incredibly crude way. But when two women have a graphic discussion of their sex lives in a supermarket aisle, you know it has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with Louie's desire to shock. All it does is repulse.
There's no profanity on Louie you won't also hear on HBO's returning Deadwood (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), but in Deadwood, the words serve artistic purpose. Coupled with the characters' poetic if somewhat impenetrable syntax, the language separates us from these Wild West residents, and them from their more settled, civilized contemporaries. For all the artificiality of the language, there has seldom been a show that felt more authentic.
Considering Deadwood is returning in excellent creative form, you'd think people would be focused on the episodes ahead. Instead, HBO allowed word of the show's cancellation to precede its return, stirring up a firestorm that forced the network to commission two story-concluding movies.
Which means the only undulled bright spot in the Sunday lineup is the remarkably sweet-spirited Entourage (10 ET/PT), which returns for a third season with funnier episodes and higher stakes, as Vince awaits the results of his big movie premiere. These are wildly over-privileged people partying through a world few of us will ever glimpse, and yet they feel more like three-dimensional, likable human beings than Louie's maniacally cursing cartoons can ever hope to achieve. It's amazing what better writing and acting can do.
Yet HBO is wasting this lead-in on Lucky Louie. That's not bad luck. That's just sheer stupidity.
And that, sad to say, often is TV.
Posted 6/8/2006 9:26 PM ET Updated 6/8/2006 11:23 PM ET
LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-comedy7jun07,0,2947120.story?coll=la-home-entertainment)
Boston (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/06/09/hbo_banks_on_the_boys_with_a_trio_of_comedies/)
HBO banks on the boys with a trio of comedies
By Matthew Gilbert, Globe Staff | June 9, 2006
Call it ``guys' night in." On Sunday, HBO begins a new programming lineup featuring a bunch of porn-using, attention-loving, curse-inventing, beer-belly-bearing dudes. Sure, these men bust each other plenty, but they always hug it out -- with conspicuous non sexual back pats, of course.
With Tony Soprano and his crew weakening and then departing in 2007, HBO is declaring a new demographic war on young men. This summer, from 9 to 11:30 p.m. on HBO's most valuable night, you'll find a sort of Howard Stern - flavored sundae with Vince Vaughn sprinkles on top. Look for the good (``Entourage"), the bad (``Dane Cook's Tourgasm"), and the ugly (``Lucky Louie"), all airing right after the return of HBO's most brilliantly artful of stinky sinkholes, David Milch's ``Deadwood."
Seriously, you wouldn't want to do laundry for the HBO men, who now include the comedian Louis C.K., a one-time Boston boy. His explicit sitcom, ``Lucky Louie," premieres in the 10:30 slot, and it's one of HBO's more fascinating series -- but not because it's good, or funny.
It's actually a failed experiment in TV genre, and a reminder of the power of the unspoken and the unseen in entertainment. When you can swear like a sailor and simulate love making openly in an old-fashioned sitcom, as the actors do on ``Lucky Louie," you don't generate much excitement or outrageousness. Often, shock depends on the forbidden for its ballast.
``Lucky Louie" is HBO's first-ever conventional multi-camera sitcom, complete with live audience laughter and a fake-looking set. It's the antithesis of the more sophisticated TV comedy that HBO has championed, from ``The Larry Sanders Show" to ``Sex and the City." But while ``Lucky Louie" mimics old-school sitcoms such as ``The Honeymooners," ``Roseanne," and ``The King of Queens," it's also frankly sexual. In tonight's episode, for instance, Kim (Pamela Adlon) catches her chunky lug of a husband Louie pleasuring himself in a closet. Next week, the series becomes even more unreserved, as the couple make love during a scene -- while exchanging quips, naturally.
Kim is a nurse who suffers Louie's quirks; Louie is a James Belushi type with a part-time job at a muffler shop and buddies with whom he can complain about women; and they have one adorable preteen daughter. They're just another working-class TV family, and if the same characters appeared on a network series they'd be definitively unoriginal.
On HBO, they're definitely unoriginal -- with sex. But let's be kind and say that Louie C.K. and HBO are ambitiously trying to usher an antique sitcom format into today's risque standards and see how it holds up. It's a study in cultural change. I don't think HBO would have anything to do with this lousy series if that weren't the agenda.
The masturbation content on ``Lucky Louie," so self-conscious and forced, made me think of the ``Contest" episode of ``Seinfeld," when the four friends competed to see who could refrain the longest. The word ``masturbation" was never used (according to Julia Louis-Dreyfus, NBC forbade it) and that fact made the half-hour funnier than ever.
``Will & Grace" also toyed successfully with ``dangerous" material, as the writers mustered their wit to make their sexual humor clear and yet stealth. Prudishness is boring, but pushing the envelope isn't fun when the envelope is torn wide open.
``Entourage" is compensation for ``Lucky Louie." Entering its third season Sunday at 10 p.m., ``Entourage" is the Hollywood satire with a heart. It makes good fun of movie-business self-importance and superficiality, in the way Fox's failed sitcom ``Action" did. But it also includes a collection of affectionately drawn characters whose successes and failures matter to us, and whose boyishness is amusing. The gang of five -- star Vince, brother Johnny Drama, dude-in-waiting Turtle, manager Eric, and agent Ari -- has jelled into a dynamic unit.
Based on the first three episodes, this season will add dimension to the characters, including Jeremy Piven's Ari, whose expanding sado-masochistic rapport with receptionist Lloyd (Rex Lee) has become one of the series' little gems. In the first episode, we meet the guys' moms, most notably Vince and Johnny's mother, when Vince tries to lure her to LA for the opening of his ``Aquaman." In a bit of perfect casting, she's played by Mercedes Ruehl. She's more like Johnny, with superstitions and competitiveness, but she probably doted on her baby Vince. Also, in episode 3, we meet one of the guys' buddies from Queens, as well as Ari's daughter's boyfriend.
The successes and failures of these guys -- and they are all guys, since female characters such as Debi Mazar's publicist get little attention -- has been a great device. They can never quite relax, because fame and money are so fickle and fleeting in Hollywood. Vince is only as good as his last movie, and if ``Aquaman" isn't a blockbuster, he, his friends, and Ari will be yesterday's news. And as long as they're on their toes, they're worth watching.
The oddest thing about ``Tourgasm," at 11, is that it's like a nonfictional ``Entourage." The docu-reality show follows four male comedians who live on a bus together as they perform around the country. Dane Cook has a Vince-like presence, since he is t he most successful and charismatic of the four. He's surrounded by Robert Kelly, Jay Davis, and Gary Gulman, each of whom has character traits similar to the guys in Vince's posse. As their customized ``Tourgasm" bus cruises along, they lose track of time and place, nerves go on edge, and mundane reality arguments occur.
And that's about it. We get snippets of the guys onstage at their gigs, but most of ``Tourgasm" tracks the morale on the bus. One minute, the porn jokes are flying, the next Davis is having a snit fit because he doesn't want to talk about porn. Whenever there is a clash, Cook jumps in as a peacekeeper, in case we didn't already know he's a nice guy. ``We've got to be the glue for each other," he tells the viewers.
But in trying to make the bus melodramas seem important, Cook stretches too far. This is a cross-country tour, something most performers have experienced, and there's nothing particularly special about it. Cook pretends that the bus dynamics are TV gold, but you can feel him straining to be convincing.
Cook is headed for greater stardom, for sure; just watch him dance around the stage as he pours out his stand - up material. He's a likable and formidable force. But ``Tourgasm" isn't going to get him to the top any faster. His show is too much like a dull season of MTV's ``Road Rules," without the women.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.