LEGIT

** (out of ****)

Louie and Legit are two FX comedies in which their stand-up comedian stars, Louis CK and Jim  Jeffries, respectively, play themselves. Aside from the fact that they both have five letter titles that begin with L, that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Not every comedy has to be Louie, no comedy ever has been or probably will be again, but, in this post-Louie world we’re living in, bad shows can look even worse in comparison. Where Louie takes the worldview that its star has been creating, through his stand-up, for over a decade, and then shows us a world through that perspective, Jeffries instead creates a world that sets him up to deliver the same bits we could get through his stand-up…and not much else. The rest of the pilot is filled with an “envelope pushing” plotline, in this case Jim and a friend take a dying kid to a brothel to have sex for the first time, which allows us to see evidence that Jim isn’t a great guy, and just when you think he’s taken a step forward, he’ll actually take a step or two back. Jim Jeffries seems so intent on showing how real he keeps it, and like it is he tells it, that it makes for a shallow character, one that would have been perfectly suited as one of a group of friends, but doesn’t really bode well as a lead.

KROLL SHOW

*** (out of ****)

Fans of The League may not know how talented Nick Kroll, who plays Ruxin, is, but comedy podcast fans, of which Nick Kroll is an elite all-star, know the potential that this skit show could have. Kroll has built up a stable of characters through his stand-up and podcast appearances, including El Chupacabra and Bobby Bottleservice, each of them much more developed than a funny impression. None of those characters appeared in the pilot episode, but what we do get is a surprising diversity as far as the type of skits we get here, from brutally-paced surrealism to reality show parodies with dead-on-ball-accuracy. Kroll doesn’t display a need to throw everything in your face all at once, and this ability to allow his characters to breathe makes the gaps between punchlines all the more bearable. It’s hard to imagine Kroll Showever becoming as subversive, or as much of a crossover hit, as Chapelle’s Show, but we could be standing on the precipice of getting introduced to a lot of great characters, which will be fun until the Borat impersonators get their hands on them.

– Ryan Haley