Critics reviews

C.K. has a prodigious ear for the way people reveal themselves intentionally in keeping with their personas, while signaling something deeper and less controlled in the process. Horace and Pete, then, has something pivotally in common with its characters: It's mannered and vulnerable, polished and neurotically raw, each quality informing the others in surprising and resonant dimensions.

As with a masterwork of any art form, it is impossible to know where to begin with Louis CK's galvanic, unprecedented web series Horace and Pete... It's a testament to CK's astonishing talents that each and every character on this show, shot midweek in the manner of a live, in-the-moment stage play and posted on CK's web site a couple of days later, seems to fully exist in our real world, fueled by a narrative that avoids cliché at every turn.

The combination of a hermetically sealed setting and no-fuss filmmaking is spot-on, but scene for scene, the show's scripts are a mess — as lumpy as a typical half-hour of Louie, but without the insurance policy of knowing you're watching a filmmaking laboratory where the point is to throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks... Still, the series lingers in the mind. With its hurts and silences and its sense of impending doom, it is unlike anything else that calls itself American television.

As the first episode of a television show, let us say, Horace and Pete is too long, baggy, in need of editing, and could probably use a re-write. It lacks direction, in every sense. As a movie, let us also say, it's uninspired, a bit dismal. It's too short, its perspective too limited, and it lacks vision (again, in different senses of the word)... It's hard to avoid the admission that it is not, ultimately, a very well worked-out work of art. It's not great. But that's also what's great about it.

it's a formal televisual experiment up there with other jagged gems like Lisa Kudrow's Web Therapy... And when the hell was it filmed? It feels timeless but it's bewilderingly current — it even mentions the Iowa caucus and Trump's Fox boycott. Was it shot last week?! Was it improvised? I don't know. What I do know is that it takes on the dark and bright sides of nostalgia with equal force. It's achingly, even anti-dramatically, even-handed.