Louis CK's sexual harassment has kept Louie from being recognized as one of the decade's best and most influential shows

Vox

"Had you asked me in 2015 to name the frontrunner for my favorite show of the 2010s, I wouldn’t have hesitated — FX’s Louie," says Emily Todd VanDerWerff. "But," she adds, "the longer the show ran, the more the bloom came off the rose." Season 4, in particular, frustrated some critics. "A few years later, if you look at my list of the seminal TV shows of the 2010s, Louie isn’t on it," says VanDerWerff. "Many of the shows that were influenced by it are there — from Girls to Atlanta to Fleabag — but Louie itself is not. And I’m not the only critic who excluded it. The A.V. Club (where I reviewed the show’s fourth season) not only didn’t recognize Louie as a top show of the decade but didn’t make room for it on a list of 100 top shows. Louie might have been groundbreaking. It might even still be a good show. But all of the trust C.K. had earned with me dissipated in an instant in 2017, when he confessed to masturbating in front of multiple women without their consent, then began a long, public tour of insisting he wasn’t so bad after all. (FX canceled Louie soon afterward.) Louie might have been hugely influential, but it was ruined by its creator’s d*ck."