Louie

Series three, episode one
In his brief opening stand-up interlude, Louis CK is all about first-world problems. How do you choose a Blu-ray player? After all, ‘they’re all the same. They’re all made from the same Asian suffering.’ And as far as comedy goes, that bleak observation is pretty much all she wrote.

Louis CK is a slightly deceptive comedic experience at the best of times – his chipper onstage demeanour barely masks his true calling as a genuinely virtuosic black-sky thinker. And the rest of this lengthy season three opener wears its existential turmoil on its sleeve with CK’s Louie character discovering he’s in line for a tilt at one of US TV’s holy grails.

Could he be the new Letterman? And why the hell would he want to be? There’s a certain self-conscious irony to CK’s working of his bulging contact book here. David Lynch, Susan Sarandon, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock all make appearances. And this, in its own way, is Louis keeping it real – this is his life now and it’s no bed of roses. First world problems indeed…