2016 - 2016
Horace and Pete is a ten-episode limited series Louis C.K. wrote, directed, edited, and then sold directly to viewers from his own website for five dollars an episode. No network. No streaming deal. No publicity rollout. In January 2016 he emailed his mailing list to say a new show existed, and a link. That was the launch.
The premise is almost aggressively un-commercial. Horace (Louis C.K.) and Pete (Steve Buscemi) are middle-aged half-brothers and cousins running Horace and Pete's, a Brooklyn bar their family has owned since 1915. Horace is divorced, depressed, and stuck in the life his father handed him. Pete is quietly coming apart under the weight of a serious mental illness he manages with medication he cannot always afford. Uncle Pete (Alan Alda) sits on a stool in the corner of the bar and dispenses bile. Sylvia (Edie Falco) is Horace's sister, fighting breast cancer and fighting harder for her share of the business. Marsha (Jessica Lange) is Horace's ex, and the wound has not closed. Tricia (Rebecca Hall) is a waitress whose quiet capability keeps the place functional.
The episodes are long. Some run over an hour. Nothing is paced for television in any conventional sense.
The ensemble is the reason this thing works, and the reason the gamble paid off. Buscemi, in particular, does the work of his career here. He is typecast in most people's heads as the nervous-energy side man, the Nucky-adjacent weasel, the Coen brothers punchline. In Horace and Pete he plays a man with a psychotic disorder trying to be a good brother and a good bartender on days his brain will not let him, and he does it with a tenderness and stillness you would not have guessed he had. It is a quiet demolition of how he was cast for thirty years.
Alan Alda is the other revelation. Most viewers think of him as the warm moral centre of M*A*S*H or the wit in The West Wing. Here he is an old racist alcoholic who hates every person who walks into the bar, and he plays it without a hint of winking. The Uncle Pete monologue in the pilot is the moment the show announced itself as something serious. Falco brings her Sopranos authority to Sylvia; Jessica Lange brings forty years of screen history to two scenes and makes them count. Rebecca Hall, in a smaller role, is the still point the louder characters orbit. Steven Wright, Hannibal Buress, and a rotating cast of barflies fill the background with the kind of texture only comedians ad-libbing around a bar set can produce.
Visually the show is a single set. One bar. Three 35mm film cameras. No score. No laugh track. Shot in long takes on a Brooklyn soundstage with a small audience in the room. It looks and feels like a play someone had the sense to film properly. The reference points are Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller rather than anything on cable in 2016.
What the static staging gives you is a forced concentration on the words and the faces. A long Falco-Louis C.K. scene about a daughter neither of them knows how to parent anymore runs unbroken for eight minutes. A Buscemi monologue about getting his dosage right plays out in a single shot. The show trusts actors to hold the camera, and trusts the audience to sit through silence.
Rebecca Hall
Tricia
Aidy Bryant
Bar patron
Alan Alda
Uncle Pete
Hannibal Buress
Tom
Reg E. Cathey
Mo
Louis C.K.
Horace Wittel
Jessica Lange
Marsha
Colin Quinn
Regular
Paul Simon wrote and performed the theme.
Beneath the bar-family plot it is a show about inheritance. Who you are because of the family you came from, who you are trying to become in spite of them, and whether those two things can ever be the same person. The bar has been there for a hundred years. Every Horace and every Pete in the family tree has been damaged by the last one. Horace does not want to pass the damage on to his own kids, and the show is brutally honest about how hard that is to do.
It is also, quietly, a show about the American public square and how it has shrivelled. The regulars come to the bar to argue about politics, race, and the 2016 election, and the arguments are uglier and more honest than anything TV news was producing at the time. Uncle Pete does not have opinions you are meant to agree with. He has opinions you are meant to recognise from somebody in your own family.
When it landed, the reviews were as good as reviews get. Critics called it the best thing C.K. had ever done, and a number of them called it one of the most ambitious American TV projects in years. A few of those same critics would, within eighteen months, have to revisit their praise.
In late 2017 Louis C.K. admitted to the sexual misconduct that multiple women had accused him of, and his mainstream career effectively ended. The existing body of work did not vanish, but the lens on it changed. Horace and Pete is a 2016 artefact made by a creator whose public reputation was still intact, and it sits in that strange category of art that is better than the reputation of the person who made it, at least for now. How much that bothers you is a question everyone has to answer on their own. My view is that the work of Buscemi, Alda, Falco, Lange, and Hall deserves to be seen, and that the show itself is more interesting and more generous than anything the creator's public conduct would suggest.
A reminder: if you liked the stagey chamber-drama register here, there is nothing else on TV that is quite doing what it does. The closest cousins on the site are the HBO character work of The Sopranos (Falco territory), the theatrical gangster opulence of Boardwalk Empire (Buscemi as lead), and the structurally brave anthology approach of Fargo.
Ten years on, the distribution story is still the thing the industry remembers. A major creator cut the studios out, paid for the show himself, released it on his own website, and proved the audience was there. That model did not exactly become the standard. But every Substack, every direct-to-fan Patreon drama, every paid-newsletter-turned-TV-pilot owes a small debt to the experiment C.K. ran in early 2016.
The work itself holds up better than the career around it. It is a bar. Two brothers. A sick sister. An ugly uncle. An ex-wife who has not forgiven him. A waitress who has seen it all. Ten episodes. No one is trying to sell you anything, because there is nothing to sell. Just the show.
Steve Buscemi
Pete
Edie Falco
Sylvia
Steven Wright
Leon