‘This or nothing’

THE comedian Louis CK leans back in a chauffeured sedan inching along the Hollywood Freeway and watches the other cars stuck in neutral. He has just taped “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” and now, whiskey in hand, is trying to focus on the unthinkable. What if “Lucky Louie,” the new HBO series the veteran comic considers the most important project of his life, stalls?

Some of his favorite projects (say, the critically maligned movie “Pootie Tang,” which he wrote and directed) have failed on a grand scale. Eventually, after severe shock and depression, he has always managed to recover, he says. His latest show, though, is as divisive as few others before it have been. Audiences -- and critics -- have voiced wildly mixed opinions on “Lucky Louie,” now entering its sixth week.

But CK can’t think about that right now.

With six remaining episodes yet to air, he is pouring himself into an additional eight scripts that HBO has commissioned but hasn’t yet committed to producing.

“I don’t care about the other way it could go. This is it, this or nothing,” CK says. “I have to be totally suicidal about it. There is no failure for this show. I have to assume this thing is what I will do for years to come.”

It helps that CK (a somewhat phonetic version of his surname, Szekely) is pumped by his performance on “Leno”: an intense, profane riff about his toddler that won big laughs from an initially unresponsive audience. At the moment, it looks like it could all work out.

“Lucky Louie,” a Sunday night experiment in a network-style family sitcom format for HBO, has attracted relatively small -- and declining -- ratings along with some visceral reactions from arbiters of television comedy.

The number of viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research, averaged 1.6 million for the premiere and dropped to 1.5 million the second week, 1.3 million the third and 1.2 million the fourth. That meant the show finished third behind “Entourage” and “Deadwood,” which showed similar week-to-week declines on HBO’s Sunday night. Over the same four weeks, “Entourage” declined from 2.8 to 2 million, and Deadwood from 2.5 to 1.7 million.

Viewer comments about “Lucky Louie” on various TV websites have called it “brutally honest” and “one of the only shows out there that people can relate to,” with people predicting Emmys. Then there were those who said “please take it off immediately” and “shocked that a show on HBO could be this bad,” and predicted it would be canceled by August.

Half loved the live audience laughs, the coarse “real life” vulgarities, the nudity; the rest hated them.

And they were just echoing the critics: “A show so vile, it makes you think the company’s arrogant” (USA Today). “The comedy is nifty, light and kind” (New York Times).

Barbara Walters, on “The View,” called the show “unbelievably raunchy and racist.” She asked fellow panelists, “Are there no boundaries?”

For now, though, HBO stands behind it. “We’re looking for it to keep building over time,” says Carolyn Strauss, HBO’s president of entertainment. “It’s keeping with our mandate, working with really talented people with a point of view.” Plus, she says, “it really makes me laugh.”

If nothing else, says Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular television at Syracuse University, “Lucky Louie” is a “fascinating experiment.”

In form, it hews closely to situations mined as far back as “The Honeymooners” and “The Life of Riley” -- the husband frittering away the couple’s rent money, the wife trying to change her husband’s eating habits. But in content, Thompson says, it’s able to use the “full palette of American language” and sexual content far beyond the reach of network television.

“Lucky Louie,” though, has a gentle quality and more tenderness than, say, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” which, he says, could be mean-spirited at times.

For his part, CK calls the show “stripped-down, funny theater.” He plays a smart, frustrated part-time mechanic whose down-and-dirty fights with his wife, a smart, full-time nurse, center on money, sex and parenting. They have unsexy “married” sex, with their T-shirts on. Secret activities involving cake or magazines occur in the closet.

The show is about 70% there now, CK says. And he should know. He also helped launch “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” “The Chris Rock Show” and “The Dana Carvey Show,” as well as three relatively unsuccessful pilots based, like “Lucky Louie,” on his own life.

Building a show is like putting a water pump in a car, he says. Except that when a car starts clunking, you can turn it off and figure out what’s wrong. A show has to be fixed while it’s still moving.

“People are going to be writing stories saying this car is loud and horrible, these people don’t know what they’re doing. And you go, ‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry, but I swear to God it’s going to be quiet in a minute.’ ”

Real family life

CK takes his comedy seriously. Classic sitcoms such as “The Honeymooners” held up a mirror to American family life, in which people “trying to survive the American dream” could see themselves reflected, he says. Because such shows don’t exist anymore, he says, he “owes it to people” to provide a comic outlet for the intense pressures of modern family life.

At 38, CK is paunchy, with freckles that match his thinning red hair. His language is vulgar, his humor unsentimental yet not cynical, with some radical mischief thrown in. As a blue-collar family show, the series has been compared to “a David Mamet parody of ‘Roseanne’ ” (People) and “Everybody Loves Raymond” with the comfortable bits sandblasted off.

The plan was “to do a show that people are used to looking at, that’s calm and has all parts of it controlled. And we’re going to curse. We’re going to [make love] on camera. We’re going to show full-on penises. We’re going to talk about God in horrible ways, just let people act the way they really are. Of course, part of the experiment is let’s see if conservative Americans freak out, and see what part that plays in it.”

He says his humor clicks with comedy nerds and over-thinking members of the comedy crowd. “But to me, it’s not really legitimate material until I can take it to Atlanta or Poughkeepsie or Peoria or Cincinnati. I definitely want ‘just folks’ to like this show.”

CK grew up in a working-class neighborhood of Newton, Mass., with friends from both Harvard Square and the block. “I skipped college,” is the way he puts it. English was his second language, since he spent his early childhood in Mexico. His mother held two jobs as a computer programmer and a teacher while his father attended Harvard Business School.

“We ate out of the microwave my whole childhood,” he says. “I’d say, ‘I’m hungry’; she’d say, ‘Make yourself a bologna sandwich.’ I’d say, ‘I don’t want a bologna sandwich’; she’d say, ‘Well then, you’re not that hungry.’ ”

He’s interrupted by the ring of his cellphone. “I have to answer this in case it’s my wife. Hello? Hey! I’m glad it’s you. I didn’t want to call and wake anybody up. Honey, it was really, really good.... Jay had a joke about Kitty [his toddler] being a stripper. We can never let Kitty see this segment. But I said she’s an ... and the place freaked out. It was really explosive and worked perfectly.”

He and his wife, Alix, married for seven years, live in upstate New York, but he keeps a place in Venice. The kids, 4 and 1, don’t watch TV. “I think it burns out their ability to enjoy life and I’m not going to do that, but it means I’ve got to entertain them all the time and take care of them, which is hard,” he says.

Failing as a parent is not an option. “You’re ruining a life,” he says. It’s those kinds of stakes that, when added to fatigue and frustration, lower his boiling point. He says you still have to admit that kids at times can be a pain. “It doesn’t make me love them less,” he says. “Parents have to be able to do that.”

Sharing that frustration with other parents in audiences and at work is a catharsis, he says. “To me, all of that is positive, and it’s fun to share it with people.” Sometimes, he says, he consults on scripts with Pamela Adlon, a mother of three who plays his TV wife. “She gave me a lot of perspective. We wrote an episode together called ‘Discipline,’ ” in which one parent undercuts the other’s authority in order to soften the blow.

CK likes the freedom of HBO, where executives push him to be real rather than likable. Networks, he says, “want people to test high, to be likable, not relatable. To me, relatable and compelling and unique is funny. ‘Likable’ is this other thing. You have to show you’ve saved an orphan or two. You have to always make excellent choices in life.

“I don’t feel love when I watch those shows. It’s fake. It’s plastic Barbie doll love.”

Real love, according to CK, is about trust and knowing you can depend on the other person. “It becomes about being dug-in-the-dirt together partners and knowing what you hate about each other and knowing what you depend on with each other and knowing that, despite the fact that this person is awful in a thousand ways and despite the fact that this person will never stop hating the things about you that they hate, you go, ‘Yeah, I choose you still.’

“That’s something that can last forever.”

Going positive

CK has read some of the negative reviews. He says he wonders about people who complain about sex with T-shirts on or about too much profanity, or who call him “ugly.” It makes him think they can’t handle the way people normally act, talk and look. But negatives never stick, only positives do, he says. Take “Pootie Tang.” The 2001 film about a cultural folk hero from the ghetto who battles evil Corporate America with a magic belt was compared by Roger Ebert to a “lab experiment where the room smells like swamp gas and all the mice are dead.” But the film eventually developed a cult following, and some fans still write him asking how they can get the magic belt. When he hosted the Oscars last year, Chris Rock used it to illustrate how his own career survived a disaster.

CK recalls that in the middle of the “Pootie Tang” crisis, Paramount motion picture President John Goldwyn, shaking with anger, told him that the movie was unreleasable.

“I’m sitting in this chair, knowing my career is being annihilated, and a big part of me is going, ‘I’m on the lot at Paramount, now sitting in the biggest, most important office, being yelled at by Samuel Goldwyn’s grandson.

“ ‘This is rare air, man. This is ... cool.’ ”