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Archive for February 7th, 2016

2016-02-07

Horace and Pity

I’m sick again, which is hopefully not the leitmotif of 2016. Nothing serious, just a cold, but I’d barely recovered from the last bout of flu. So I’m mostly sleeping, ssh’ing into things to move stuff out of the shutting-down coloc, and watching Louis CK’s Horace and Pete, which is like a little off-off-Broadway production if community theater had HD cameras, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, Alan Alda, and Paul Simon. I don’t mean that in a bad way!

I appreciate CK’s deliberate attempts not to pre-publicise. The first anyone heard about the show was a short mail from him to his subscribers, announcing just the show’s title and the price, $5, payable in PayPal, Amazon, Bitcoin and the rest. A day or so later he explained a bit more:

Part of the idea behind launching it on the site was to create a show in a new way and to provide it to you directly and immediately, without the usual promotion, banner ads, billboards and clips that tell you what the show feels and looks like before you get to see it for yourself. As a writer, there’s always a weird feeing that as you unfold the story and reveal the characters and the tone, you always know that the audience will never get the benefit of seeing it the way you wrote it because they always know so much before they watch it. And as a TV watcher I’m always delighted when I can see a thing without knowing anything about it because of the promotion. So making this show and just posting it out of the blue gave me the rare opportunity to give you that experience of discovery.

It’s a TV show that hasn’t been broadcast on anything like a television network. Not unheard of, but it also feels like a play and a personal project. Is television simply a format now: episodic, under two hours, a budget within these boundaries? I expect that Horace and Pete will end up on TV eventually, but then so do films.

It’s pretty good. It kept my attention through the headaches and coughing and woe and the is and the me. It’s consoling to watch someone do a Mike Leigh about people I am like, rather than people I don’t like. Fumbled lines and good-enough first takes, make me fall in love with you, always. It’s a toolkit of forms and performances being put to good use.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.