Louis C.K.’s surprise new series, “Horace and Pete,” which débuted on Saturday, is startling, sometimes funny, and often despairing. Still From “Horace and Pete”

On Saturday morning, just after ten o'clock, while the lazy or childless among us were still futzing about for coffee in our kitchens, the comedy auteur Louis C.K. sent an e-mail to his list of subscribers announcing the release of a surprise project. "Hi there," the e-mail began. "Horace and Pete episode one is available for download. $5. Go here to watch it. We hope you like it." A couple of clicks and a credit-card authorization later, fans had access to a startling, sometimes funny, often despairing hour and seven minutes of "Horace and Pete," written and directed by, and starring, Louis C.K.

If C.K. were still required to attend network pitch meetings, the show might be billed as "Cheers" meets "The Iceman Cometh." It has the feel of a stage play but is filmed using cuts and camera zooms, and it takes place in a dark, windowless Brooklyn bar, which is run by Horace (C.K.) and Pete (Steve Buscemi) and their uncle Pete—played, brilliantly, by a dishevelled and profane Alan Alda. (Alda's funniest monologue from a long career of funny monologues had been, to this point, his pretentious definition of comedy from Woody Allen's "Crimes and Misdemeanors." It now has a challenger: an uproarious diatribe that includes the line "The thing with you, Horace, you're not a cocksucker, you're a pissant.") They are joined by a collection of barflies played by Jessica Lange, Steven Wright, Nick DiPaolo, and others, and by Aidy Bryant, of "Saturday Night Live," who plays Horace's daughter, and Edie Falco, as his sister, who wants to shut down the flagging bar.

Of course, C.K. doesn't have to go to pitch meetings anymore, and that's part of the point, both of his success and of the thrill that met the covert release of this new show. For several years, C.K. has used a simple distribution model, by which he releases many of his projects, primarily comedy specials, directly to fans through his Web site, at a cost of five dollars. (This includes the plain request that people not be assholes, and pay for it rather than steal it.) This sort of industry eye-poke has further endeared him to his fans, who see C.K. not only as a comedy visionary but a no-nonsense disrupter and rebel. "Horace and Pete," which appears to be the first episode in a series but could also stand alone as a single piece of television, is C.K.'s most audacious independent creation yet.

The first episode was shot in New York and is set in the very immediate present; a TV news show playing at the bar notes Donald Trump's decision to skip the most recent Republican debate and mentions that the Iowa caucuses are just days away. This gives the show an added jolt of not only immediacy but also exclusivity—as if, instead of paying five dollars and streaming or downloading the show on your computer, you had instead stumbled downstairs into a small theatre in the city this past Friday night for a surprise performance of a new play with a cast of famous, funny people. Oh, and with an original theme song written by Paul Simon.

The show's topicality also gives fresh life to what are, for C.K., recurring themes. Hipsters are shallow and inscrutable, daughters bewilder their fathers, old and young people can't talk about race or gender or sexuality without alienating and enraging each other, each new day is as trying and confusing as the last. The comedian Kurt Metzger plays one of the bar's patrons, and he is on hand to rant about how Trump's political success is the just and natural outcome for country in which the people have given themselves over entirely to consumerism and nonsense. "If we vote for him, that just means we want to go down," he says. "So let us go down." DiPaolo, comedy's resident conservative counter-voice, takes part in an extended debate with a young liberal (Zach Cherry) about the relative merits of their opposing worldviews, a discussion mediated by Jonathan Hadary, who attempts to steer them, as C.K. often attempts to do in his standup, toward basic understanding and consensus. The show also invokes another of C.K.'s frequent laments: our excessive dependence on technology—there's a funny bit in which Horace leaves voice messages for his adult daughter, only to receive text messages in response; and Alda's Uncle Pete, at one point, yells at a young woman talking on her cell phone, telling her to turn it off. Later, he kicks all the young customers out of the bar. The hour dramatizes the talking points of the political present: race, health care, the struggle of small businesses, the general ennui that this election cycle has produced in many voters. It's like an ad produced by a Super PAC funded by angry comedians, in support of no one.

Yet the show itself is not a conventional comedy, nor is it, in the model of C.K.'s FX show, "Louie," a gloomy, tonally diverse comedy. It's not really a comedy at all. C.K. has written a piece of drama, peopled by the lost and the sad and the forgotten, about the cruel bonds of family, the despair caused by passing time, and the modern entanglements that feel beyond our control. It's grim stuff, best met with a sad laugh and another round from the bar. At one point, it's revealed that Horace and Pete's has been watering down its booze for the past hundred years. Uncle Pete protests that, in addition to being good business, it's been done as a public service: "These aren't customers, they're alcoholics."

Despite its dim view of the cultural moment, and the bitter edges of its characters, there is something exhilarating and hopeful about the show. Part of that comes from the verve of its creation and surprise arrival. Its very production and distribution feels like a political act—a demonstration of the power of creativity, and a rebuke to the well-known mechanics of television: pilots, polls, advertising dollars, viewer demographics, and the like. Parts of the show work better than others, the seams appear in places, the large cast of well-known comedians and actors makes it feel a little like a benefit concert. But all of this is part of its impromptu appeal, and the performers, given strong material and thrown together in the warm space of a murky bar, rise to surprisingly urgent and, at times, moving heights. We've seen these performers elsewhere, we know many of them well, but, for a little over an hour, they are fully these characters, part of a specific and indelible extended family. This is the magic of theatre, more than of television, which usually relies on the repetition of many episodes to create a pleasing familiarity. C.K. has pulled off another clever trick.