Review: ‘Louie’ – ‘Looking for Liz/Lilly Changes’

A quick review of tonight’s “Louie” coming up just as soon as I speak Slovenian…

“She changed how I feel about everything, in one night.” -Louie

“Louie” has always taken an agnostic approach to continuity. The show doesn’t completely ignore it – Louie’s daughters are always hid daughters, and every Pamela appearance plays in some way off of what we’ve seen in the previous ones – but is willing to ignore continuity whenever it proves inconvenient.

This has been a surprisingly continuity-heavy season, however, with tonight providing a sequel of sorts to Louie’s long, strange, memorable date with Liz. But where I thought the date episode was one of the show’s best ever, “Looking for Liz” was this season’s first major disappointment.

Where “Daddy’s Girlfriend Part 2” managed to transcend all the familiar “women be crazy” tropes, “Looking for Liz” fell right into them. Liz was unstable, but in a way that episode, and Louie, found sympathetic – and also very specific – rather than something to generate cheap laughs. The Chloe Sevigny(*) character, on the other hand, was just a kook. Louie goes looking for one erratic bookstore clerk he was charmed by, and instead winds up with a walking punchline.

(*) Now I’m trying to imagine an alternate version of this season where Sevigny played Liz and Parker Posey played her replacement.

“Lilly Changes,” while continuing the theme of the female gender being an absolute mystery to Louie, at least fit with what we know about his relationship with Lilly, with his ex-wife, with Jane, etc. It was slight, but funny in spots (particularly in the cops’ disgusted reaction to Louie), and the laughs felt earned.

What did everybody else think?

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