HBO's 'Louie' more lousy than lucky HBO's luck has run out. Once seen as a televised art house, thanks to series such as Sex and the City and Six Feet Under, HBO has discovered the downside of early success: You're expected to replicate it. Instead, the pay service has ceded ratings and creative ground to basic cable through a string of failures including The Mind of the Married Man, The Comeback, Carnivale, K Street and Unscripted. Even HBO's better series, The Wire, Deadwood and Entourage, can't approach the ratings of The Sopranos, which disappointed fans itself by ending an unpopular season with a finale most didn't think was final enough. So you can see why HBO would attempt to break its pattern by doing something it has never done: a traditional studio-audience-style sitcom with an only-on-cable adult twist. The smarmy result is Lucky Louie (Sunday, 10:30 p.m. ET/PT), a show so vile, it makes you think the company's arrogant It's Not TV — It's HBO slogan isn't a brag — it's a threat. Created by and starring writer Louis C.K., Lucky Louie follows the adventures of a lower-class, blue-collar couple living in a ramshackle apartment. The plots revolve around family sitcom favorites, such as Louie's wife's desire to have another child — only in this case the focus is on the act of procreation rather than the result. Sorry, but adding nudity and profanity to old jokes, old situations and old fights doesn't make them new or better or, in this case, amusing. It just makes them unpleasant. What's offensive about Louie is its condescending insistence that working-class couples never get their minds out of the bedroom and their mouths out of the gutter. Some of the sex scenes themselves actually are funny, in an incredibly crude way. But when two women have a graphic discussion of their sex lives in a supermarket aisle, you know it has nothing to do with the characters and everything to do with Louie's desire to shock. All it does is repulse. There's no profanity on Louie you won't also hear on HBO's returning Deadwood (Sunday, 9 ET/PT), but in Deadwood, the words serve artistic purpose. Coupled with the characters' poetic if somewhat impenetrable syntax, the language separates us from these Wild West residents, and them from their more settled, civilized contemporaries. For all the artificiality of the language, there has seldom been a show that felt more authentic. Considering Deadwood is returning in excellent creative form, you'd think people would be focused on the episodes ahead. Instead, HBO allowed word of the show's cancellation to precede its return, stirring up a firestorm that forced the network to commission two story-concluding movies. Which means the only undulled bright spot in the Sunday lineup is the remarkably sweet-spirited Entourage (10 ET/PT), which returns for a third season with funnier episodes and higher stakes, as Vince awaits the results of his big movie premiere. These are wildly over-privileged people partying through a world few of us will ever glimpse, and yet they feel more like three-dimensional, likable human beings than Louie's maniacally cursing cartoons can ever hope to achieve. It's amazing what better writing and acting can do. Yet HBO is wasting this lead-in on Lucky Louie. That's not bad luck. That's just sheer stupidity. And that, sad to say, often is TV. Enlarge HBO Created by and starring writer Louis C.K., Lucky Louie follows the adventures of a lower-class, blue-collar couple living in a ramshackle apartment.