Pilot - Louie [Season 1, Episode 1]

Louis C.K., to the A.V. Club last week:

My manager, Dave Becky, had me meet with John Landgraf, who runs FX, and he said “You can come do a show here, which will give you a lot of freedom, and it would just be a very cheap show.” He said he would give me $250,000 per episode to do a show there. That’s an enormously low number. It’s a gigantically small budget for a TV show. Most TV shows are around a million or so, and that’s cheap. So I didn’t really want to do it, because I really didn’t want to struggle…. He called me at home and talked to me for about three hours about his model for making television. And he said, “We just take a little bit of money and we throw it at somebody who is funny…” And I said, “The only way this is interesting to me is if you literally wire me $250,000. I’m pitching you what the show is about. I don’t want to write a script for a pilot, and I don’t want to show you anything until it’s finished. So if you give me $250,000, I’ll give you a pilot in two months…”

I said “That’s the way I’ll do the show, the pilot,” and he said, “Fine, I don’t care.” And I have this personal connection with him, because then I would get calls from him. We got the money. We formed the company, and I didn’t even have anything written down. I didn’t even know what I was going to make. But I started thinking of places to shoot, and I hired a location scout, and got locations, and I started renting cameras and producing without a script, which is a motivating way to work for me. And I started getting calls from people from FX, and they said, “We want to know who you are casting, so we can make deals with them,” and I said, “Well, I’m not telling you. I only deal with John Landgraf…” We just kept working that way, and I shot the pilot, and they loved it. And I was told we’d get another four episodes, but then they said “We’re going to make the whole season,” and gave me 12 more. The budget went up to $300,000 per episode, which is still very low. And my deal is that I get the money, and I make the show, and nobody tells me how to do it. I only showed them two episodes, because I finished them last week, but I shot four episodes without showing them a script or even pitching stories. So that’s how this is working.

From the first two episodes alone, Louie might have replaced Party Down as my favorite television show. (Sacrilege?) Louis C.K. seems to be one of those rare talents that can create amazing things even when granted an embarrassment of creative control.