Louis C.K.’s massive next move
MAY 10TH, 2016 — POST 127
It’s always perplexing what details media outlets decide to pick up on. Recently, as far as details that surround Louis C.K. go, those picked up and ran with really are astounding. On a promo cycle for the recently-concluded Horace and Pete, C.K. has been doing a bunch of interviews, the most notable of which have been with radio king Howard Stern, podcast king Marc Maron, and entertainment news king The Hollywood Reporter for their Awards Chatter podcast.
First to air was Stern, out of which flooded innumerable pieces that picked up on one kernal of the interview, where C.K. mentions the amount of debt he’s in because of making Horace and Pete. The waves of “debrief” pieces touted this as C.K.’s fatal mistake, that the reported $2mil in debt was not only unprecedented but almost going so far as to suggest “this is what you get when you don’t play by the rules”. The Maron interview cleared all this up, put it down to the fact that the sale of the show had barely begun, et cetera, and that, really, this is how TV gets made. The Reporter interview, published last week, is being chewed over, mostly by the Reporter themselves. This time, the detail that was picked on is one they are framing as the nails in the coffin of C.K.’s FX series Louie. In the closing seconds of the podcast C.K. says:
“As far as Louie goes… I think the guy that I played on the show — the just-divorced, kinda underwater dad, struggling New York comic — I don’t think I have stories for that guy anymore.”
Though C.K. does offer perspective, that the show being autobiographical could mean “that guy” has some other stories, the debrief pieces are awash with a conviction that Louie won’t be returning. Whether it’s born out of an absense of any self-aware finale of Season 5, or the fact that Louie was just so good, they’re written through with a collective grief of what we will lose should five seasons really be all of Louie we’ll ever get.
A single line in the Reporter’s piece about their own podcast contains so much more significant consequences, not only for C.K. and those that enjoy watching him but for the industry more broadly. That single line reads:
“An app is being designed, and is expected out in July, that will allow people to watch the show on their mobile devices.”
C.K. explains that this is part of the release strategy for Horace and Pete. As well as selling it to network/s, the series will remain within C.K.’s own ecosystem, the linchpin in that proposition being a mobile viewing experience. Currently, the process of buying Horace and Pete, or any other of C.K.’s (mostly live stand-up) products, involves putting in some payment details and downloading a file. That file is then watched as you would watch any video file. Yes, the website does allow the file to be streamed, but my guess is most people aren’t going to be sitting in front of a laptop for the 10+ hours of the series. What a mobile viewing experience, and one that via a device like Chromecast can easily play on a TV set, signals is that C.K. plans to do a whole lot more with the content he currently owns and that which he will own in the future.
Delivery of one’s own stand-up specials is one thing, but C.K. carrying Horace and Pete from teleplay files on his computer through to viewing (not just serving) delivery without it once leaving his ecosystem is surely the ultimate goal of any creator. In building an app, C.K. is becoming the primary destination for his own content, players like Netflix, HBO, or Amazon secondary concerns once he sees how the series plays out on his own turf. This might not seem like much, yet at least. But with Executive Producer credits across other shows like FX’s Baskets and Better Things, it is not inconceivable that C.K. could bring his future “ancillary” content, done in collaboration, within his own ecosystem, selling additional viewing rights to the big streaming services. As C.K. himself says, of Horace and Pete:
“I want to show that this model works, and I know it does because it’s selling tremendously well.”
“This model” is loaded with the potential for a kind of disruption that, for maybe the first time in recent memory, swings the pendulum to the creator. And Horace and Pete is truly an astonishing product: entirely focussed, hubristically willed into existence, utterly distinct from anything anyone has ever seen. If C.K. is able to show that this model works, we could very well be in for a period of products that too are unlike anything anyone has ever seen.
So, sure, Louie might be missed. But fuck. Think what might come in its place.
