Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
I’ll say this for Horace and Pete: It’s a show that has time for neither “Make America Great Again” nor “America Is Already Great.” This realization sunk in sometime around when Sylvia, Horace’s sister, began unsubtly guilting him into selling the family bar for the millions it could potentially net in the “air rights” to the vertical space above it in the skyscraping, skyrocketing Brooklyn real-estate market—all the better to offset the sky-high costs of the treatment she’ll have to undergo for her just-diagnosed breast cancer. “I feel like you’re using me,” he protests, and she agrees. “You’re my brother. Please let me use you, so that I don’t die, because cancer is fucking expensive.” America: land of the free, home of the people whose only hope to afford life-saving health care is gentrification and upward wealth redistribution. Horace and Pete theme-songwriter Paul Simon might have something to say about this, but perhaps his fellow New York Metro Area musician Lou Reed had it best: “Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor—I’ll piss on ’em.”
Unfortunately, the affection I have for this aspect of the show feels more like the result of my own personal fanfic remake of Roseanne with Edie Falco in the title role than something earned by the show itself. Just to get to this part of the series’ second episode, you have to wade through the good, the bad, and the ugly of writer/director/star Louis C.K.’s approach to The Big Questions of sex, death, and politics. There’s the good: a funny bit in which Horace’s late dad’s flame Marsha (Jessica Lange) materializes in his bedroom (in retrospect this is likely a fantasy, but it’s entertaining if viewed either way) and tells him “You sleep in your panties, just like your dad.” Eat your heart out, Seinfeld‘s “the panties your mother laid out for you.”
Then there’s the bad: an inert exchange about mortality and the afterlife between Horace and Pete, involving a series of cornily blunt visions of heaven and hell (the former is an eternity of drinking lemonade out of a giant pussy, the latter is your dad whupping your ass for all eternity) and contemplations of whether it’s better to wake up early in order to make the most of your autumn years or sleep in to get them over with. The silence of the nonexistent studio audience is particularly deafening here.
Finally, there’s the ugly: a crudely bigoted exchange between barflies Kurt and Leon and bartender Uncle Pete about the Syrian refugee crisis, which starts with blanket allegations of rape before swerving into a jocular discussion of the relative tearjerking merits of the Holocaust and the fate of the mom in Bambi. I’m happier than anyone to hear Steven Wright deliver deadpan punchlines like “I’d like to take some of those sentences back” during the convo’s ickier bits, but in terms of sustaining an entire scene, that’s pretty thin gruel.
That’s a problem that this episode runs into over and over. Is the scene between a college kid and an “older” woman (she’s clearly south of 40) he swiped right on Tinder just to have emotionless sex with really strong enough to justify its incongruity and running time? Does a subplot involving Marsha and her GoodFellas extra of a beau, a successful tire-store magnate who blanches at her alcoholic attachment to this particular watering hole over all the other attractions Brooklyn has to offer, offer anything other than the same flavor of misery in a different regional accident? Does Pete’s Tourette’s-afflicted hospital acquaintance represent a serious attempt to empathetically portray this particular illness, or is it just an excuse to shout racial slurs and curse words? When Uncle Pete makes fun of Horace for wetting his pants as a kid, or his daughter (Aidy Bryant, making the best of a thankless role) for being overweight, is he doing anything other than indulging a thirst for “oh no he didn’t/oh yes he did” cruelty? When Horace has a long mental conversation with a fantasy version of Marsha in which he justifies his most outré masturbatory fantasies, is this more than an author with a dubious reputation’s attempt to let himself off the hook?
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
