Caroline Suh’s feature-length Louis C.K. documentary might not see the light of day after all. On Monday, Variety reported that Showtime has opted not to move forward with the project, and that it’s currently unclear if it will be picked up elsewhere.
Suh is best known for directing Netflix’s Blackpink: Light Up the Sky, as well as the 2008 documentary Frontrunners. She also both adapted and directed Salt Fat Acid Heat for Netflix. According to Variety, her documentary would have examined both C.K. and his fall from grace—spurred by allegations of sexual misconduct against the comedian—and how the #MeToo movement has developed since then.
Last year at the Edinburgh TV Festival, David Nevins—then a top executive at Paramount Global—said that the C.K. documentary “is going to deal with all the ‘where are we now’ four, five years later after the Weinstein story broke.” (As Variety notes, Nevins stepped down last fall during a corporate restructure.)
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Representatives for both Suh and Amanda Branson-Gill, who was reportedly on board to produce the project, did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment.
New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor, Cara Buckley, and Melena Ryzik first broke the allegations against C.K. from five different women in 2017. The women all described instances in which, as one unnamed source put it, he “abused his power.” All five women alleged that the comedian had taken out his penis and masturbated in front of them.
Soon after the story broke, C.K. was forced to admit, “These stories are true.”
The comedian was contrite in his statement, but less than a year later, he was pandering to the alt-right by throwing trans people and Parkland school shooting survivors under the comedic bus as he grasped for relevance. By 2021, he’d already booked a show at Madison Square Garden, and last year, he released a feature film titled Fourth of July, which The Daily Beast critic Nick Schager described as “pretty damn terrible.”
Kantor, Buckley, and Ryzik were all involved in Suh’s documentary, as Nevins told Edinburgh TV Festival attendees last year. (The journalists did not immediately respond to The Daily Beast’s request for comment regarding the project’s fate.) At the festival, Nevins also said he did not believe that the social issues emerging from #MeToo had been resolved.
“It is really complicated,” Nevins said at the time. “And there is a bit of backlash against #MeToo—(the question now often is) who needs to go away and who is allowed to come back.”
Variety did not report a reason for Showtime’s decision. The news comes on the heels of a Sunday report from The Hollywood Reporter about how Showtime recently (and quietly) yanked a Ron DeSantis episode of its newsmagazine Vice.
