There are so many things to be said about the achievement in comedy and television making that is Louie, but I’m not gonna go there. I’m not going to talk about how Louie CK single handedly changed the business relationship between the network and the artist. I won’t bother to mention that Louis also writes the whole season alone and then manages to go on directing the episode while starring in it and then editing the finished product into a show. I’ll also forget to mention that not only is Louie one of FX’s most successful shows, it’s critically acclaimed from stunningly large amount of publications, including this one. Which makes it pretty obvious that a show held in such high regard has even higher expectations when it comes to the second season.

Now that we’ve come to a consensus on what we’re going to ignore, let’s focus on the story Louie has for us. First of all let me confess my love for the whole show basically revolving around Louie’s stand-up. It’s not only a brand new hour special that he created in one short year, he chooses to perform it in the Comedy Cellar – an infamously hard room to tell jokes in. Like most of his recent material, this episode focuses heavily on being world’s greatest single father. Louie tends to split episodes into two separate stories rather them intertwining them like traditional sitcoms, and the daughter’s arc is easily the stronger of the two. The episode kicks off with a beautifully shot scene of Louie brushing his five year old daughter’s teeth while she explains how much more she loves staying at her mother’s.

And with the ring of the doorbell, the episode flawlessly transfers over to the new story with another big aspect of his life, his sister(s). She happens to be pregnant, in town overnight and is staying with our titular hero when she awakens with stomach pains, screaming so loud that it also wakes the neighbors. Neighbors who seem sketchy at first, two guys who offer to just help, which I think is the beauty of this segment. He makes a snap judgement to let one neighbor stay with the kids, while the other accompanies him to the hospital with his sister. The whole time Louie and company are at the hospital, you’re left to imagine the worst going on back in his apartment, yet nothing is wrong when they finally return home. It really felt like Louie set up the situation to shine a light on people’s natural distrust of strangers, only to show us that hey, maybe not everyone is a bag of assholes.

While at the the hospital, his sister was dealt one of the more chaotic events in the whole show. With her screaming in pain for the majority of the second half of the episode, the tension built rapidly. Yet it felt like a huge letdown to me when they revealed the cause of her pains to be gas. And it wasn’t like someone diagnosed her; it was one of the biggest set ups I’ve seen in comedy just for a fart joke. They really tried to draw the laughs out of making the fart as long and cartoonish as possible too. Even though it’s apparently an actual problem, and Louie’s love for fart jokes is instantly apparent when you hear his material, I really had assumed he was above that. Some things seem to work better in stand up format, yet this time it felt like Louie copying other sitcoms and not setting the path. It was a very solid premiere overall, yet that one joke really ruined it from being a perfect episode for me.