With Loudermilk, Ron Livingston and the Farrelly Brothers Rethink the Misanthropic Comedy
Photo: Audience Network
After weeks of smoke from the season’s wildfires, it’s an immaculate late-summer day in North Vancouver’s Greenwood Park, and Ron Livingston is in the process of disemboweling a would-be poet. As the eponymous antihero of Audience Network’s sophomore comedy, Loudermilk, created by Peter Farrelly and Bobby Mort, the actor turns caustic, and desert dry: Ornery rock critic Sam Loudermilk, author of the book “All You Need Is Love” and 500 Other Songs to Kill Yourself To, never minces words. In the scene being filmed the morning I come to set, climbing a steep trail lined with lush ferns and fallen logs to reach a rock outcropping known as “God’s Chair,” Loudermilk crushes the spirit of an aspiring writer he finds spray-painting his nonsense onto the stone. Still, in the tradition of the misanthropic comedy, there could always be another, sharper insult to leap off the tongue. As the episode’s director, Bobby Farrelly, remarks at one point, “You could’ve given a harsher review.”
The twist, in Loudermilk, is that Sam’s a recovering alcoholic and the leader of a support group for his fellow addicts: In the annals of sitcom assholes, from Seinfeld and Californication to Curb Your Enthusiasm (twice), he might be the only one for whom the trait is tied up in a disease. It’s this, Livingston says, that defines the series’ approach to familiar TV tropes.
“A lot of comedies are built on the idea that we all have these foibles that we don’t know about or aren’t aware of that keep surfacing and we keep thinking that we’re transcending them and then life kind of drops us on our ass and laughs at us,” he says, as we sit in the shade to avoid the warm midday sun. But in Loudermilk, he adds, the challenge the characters face is much bigger than a “foible”: “It’s kind of cruelly comic how much these people aren’t in control of their lives, and it’s also profoundly uplifting the sort of courage and tenacity they put into trying to get back into control of their lives.”
In fact, one might map the series’ first season by which characters are losing, or gaining, control. Loudermilk’s sponsor, roommate, and best friend, Ben (Will Sasso), is hiding the fact that he’s off the wagon—he’s self-medicating, it seems, because he’s also sleeping with Loudermilk’s ex-wife—and Loudermilk responds to the betrayal by briefly relapsing himself. The pair also takes in a young addict named Claire (Anja Savcic), who finds increasing purpose, and solace, in sobriety, but remains relatively new to the recovery process. (Some of the most compelling moments in Season Two find Claire calling Loudermilk out for failing to heed his own advice to the group.) The result is a misanthropic comedy in which the misanthrope might be the most well-adjusted of the bunch.