Never one to care much about buzz or your feelings, Louis C.K. will follow his Emmy win for Louie by taking a long hiatus, keeping the show off the air until the spring of 2014. "I don't want it to be making the donuts," C.K. said in a network conference call today. "I want it to be something that comes from somewhere important and stays funny. It's a luxury I asked for … Season four is my job right now, but I'm going to take a whole lot of time to turn it in." FX president John Landgraf chimed in that, given how involved C.K. is in every aspect of the show, "I'm not surprised he needs a bit of a break." Though of course, that "break" includes an already-confirmed 22-city stand-up tour that will delay the writing of any new Louie stories until sometime in early 2013, leaving hardly any time for laying around and eating ice cream.
Still, C.K. says any time off will allow him to get back to a first-season mindset of feeling like the show could go anywhere, rather than relying on a stale formula of Louie meeting some crazy girl who then begins hemorrhaging out her eyeballs and then he ends up in Beijing—you know, that old routine. Anyway, if in the interim you're looking for a dose of middle-age banality mixed with stoically received horrors and outrageous twists, there's always @FakeLouieEps.