Hacker Cinema
Horace and Pete
2016 · TV series · 30 min episodes · 1 season
Created by Louis C.K.
The owners of a dive bar in Brooklyn, Horace and Pete, along with bar regulars share their experiences and lives with each other while drinking or working at the bar.
5 positive1 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
horace and pete was great, but it was definitely not for his core audience. it's not comedy or really a show. It's more like a filmed stage performance. A lot of people I know bought the first 1-2 episodes thinking it would be hysterical and never bought more after they realized what it was, and never even gave it a chance since it caught them off guard.
Goes to show, horses for courses.. I loved Horace and Pete dearly, mostly for what they were trying to do, and I watched it as if it were live theater or an old 60s british sitcom, where budgetary concerns meant they had to focus on intent.
But back to your point: YMMV. A strong part of me thinks a realistic recommendation engine will never work: the human brain doesn't know if it likes something until it encounters it, given environmental, emotional and cultural cues at the time.
The most pleasant experience I've had paying for and consuming video in the past 15 years was Horace and Pete. Heard about it through an email subscription I voluntarily signed up for, bought the first episode for a few dollars (I used Amazon but there were several options including bitcoin), downloaded the DRM free MP4, watched it, liked it, bought the rest of the episodes, downloaded, watched, downloaded, watched... No previews, no ads, no proprietary viewer, no searching through huge lists of things I will never want to see. Even when there was an option to sign up for the newsletter, which I already had, it defaulted to something like "No, don't bother me ever again you fat looser". I have all the episodes on my main computer, backed up on an external drive and in Amazon Glacier (just in case of extreme loss). When my kids are older, I'm going to show it to them and I'll know right where to find it and what the experience will be like instead of wondering if it will still be available, ad free, through my mid-tier Disney Huflix subscription.
Edit: Forgot to mention, I say past 15 years, because there was a brief moment in history where DVDs had a similar experience, the worst thing was maybe having to hit "Play". That was before "Disney FastPlay" which just gets to the ads faster, right after the 30 second explanation of "FastPlay".
The author blames the modern sitcom's remoteness from working and lower-middle class concerns with their creators' immunity from the recent recession. In place of everyday situations, we have shows set in "soundstages and writers’ rooms," the haunts of the out-of-touch in New York and LA. So you wind up with a show with this sort of genesis:
Our creator was once a prominent writer and performer on a comedy sketch show, which aired live every Saturday night from an NBC studio in New York. It ran for 90 minutes. After their time on the show came to an end, our creator decided to pitch a sitcom based on their experiences there. The lead character is the head writer on a comedy show, similarly produced in New York. They must balance their work in the writers' room and their personal life, though this turns out to be difficult. A pilot is made, and our creator plays the lead.
Modern viewers may recognize this as 30 Rock, but it is in fact The Dick Van Dyke Show. It is based not on SNL but on a direct ancestor, Your Show of Shows. Carl Reiner's performance in the pilot may have dissuaded executives from casting him in the commissioned series (hence Dick Van Dyke), while Tina Fey remained the lead in her own version. But otherwise the parallel rings a sight near perfect.
The author stumbles over himself insisting, however, that while The Dick Van Dyke Show did not give vent to working and lower-middle class concerns, it did at least feature characters who "had careers" and were definitely of a class. As if the same were not true of shows like 30 Rock (which is at times obsessed with class difference), or of Parks and Recreation and The Office. These do not depict realistic workspaces, but why place that demand on a sitcom? And why not place the same demand on, yes, The Honeymooners, Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, I Love Lucy, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, The Andy Griffith Show, and on and on. In all cases the demands of the form—and in almost all cases the demands of overly long tenures—stretched the premises and the rare attempts at realism very thin.
I think you can make an argument that the most popular comedies available right now—whether on TV or at the movie theaters—are unflinchingly escapist. (Though, as the article notes in its discussion of an episode each of Horace and Pete and Girls, this has not gone unnoticed or unremarked by all of the shows' writers. Still, these two are not the most popular things around by any stretch.) Similarly, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were seen to traipse across exclusive resorts, high-class stages, ballroom floors, and Venice, in elaborate dresses and a "top hat, white tie, and tails"—all during the Great Depression. Sometimes hard circumstances produce a public clamoring for comment; sometimes the public just wants a reprieve.
I would recommend watching episode 1 of Louis CKs new show, Horace and Pete, for a discussion about how parties talk about each other, and how they should.
>but doesn't include A-list movie stars, for example
Surely you aren't still talking about Horace and Pete. Aside from Louis C.K. himself being one of the top comedians (among other things) in America, Horace and Pete starred Alan Alda, Steve Buscemi, Jessica Lange, and Edie Falco, among others.
They, and the format of the series itself, is why I used quotes in "web series". I think it would be hard to argue that it wasn't a successful self produced distributed piece of cinematography that didn't include a cast of stars.
That said, I agree to an extent -- I haven't seen a feature length, stand alone film that has been successfully produced and distributed independently like that.
>(Yes, you can sell the film as an MP4 from your own website. But the problem is that people won't buy it because that's not how the public are used to getting their films. At a film festival I recently attended, a very respected sales agent - and that's a rare breed - asked the audience and other panel members if they knew of anyone who had made a profit selling their narrative film digitally from their own site. Nobody did.)
What about Horace and Pete (Louis C.K.'s self produced/distributed "web series")?