Louis C.K

The comedian and TV creator, who admitted to sexual misconduct back in 2017, controversially won a Grammy award last night. The incident has raised wider ...

It doesn’t mean that his work is necessarily any less meaningful, that we are not able to watch it and discover more about the world, more about ourselves, as we do with any worthwhile piece of art. But it does seem to invite a collective evaluation of how exactly we judge the work of someone like CK. It is easy for us to ignore the latest work from Woody Allen, so piss-poor has he been for decades – a boycott has all the dolour of giving up bee stings, or back-alley acupuncture, for Lent. CK was a major artist in his prime, and the fact that he has behaved terribly off-screen doesn’t make his work any less influential. Since his misconduct came to light fully in 2017, public perception has tended to perpetuate the idea that his pre-disgrace reputation was inflated – that he was simply a lucky beneficiary of an industry desperate to identify and idolise the next white male genius. It was thought-provoking and radically original – its vignette-y, avant-garde approach to storytelling was unlike anything previously seen on TV. A whole host of the best TV shows of the past five years, from Atlanta to Ramy, to the CK-produced Better Things, owe it a huge formal and aesthetic debt. There’s the severity of their transgressions. But there is more to the issue than just this.