Life with Louie

Life with Louie was Louie Anderson's childhood with the names changed and the state moved one over. Anderson created the animated sitcom with Matthew O'Callaghan for Fox and set it in the fictional town of Cedar Knoll, Wisconsin, in the early 1960s, though he grew up in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the second youngest of eleven children. The cartoon Louie is eight years old, sensitive, funny and impressionable, and uses jokes to get through the teasing about his weight, which is how Anderson described his own childhood. His catchphrase was "All right!"

The first episode, a Christmas special, ran in primetime on Fox in December 1994, before the show moved to Saturday mornings on Fox Kids in September 1995. Anderson voiced both Louie and his father, Andy, a World War II veteran who tells the family war stories, drives a Rambler and answers most things with "For crying out loud!" or "I heard that." Edie McClurg voiced the sweet-natured mother, Ora, who shares a name with Anderson's real mother, and Mary Wickes voiced the grandmother; when Wickes died during the second season, the producers wrote an episode in which Louie deals with his grandmother's death rather than recast her.

The show ran three seasons and 39 episodes, ending in March 1998, and won more than a Saturday-morning cartoon usually does: Anderson took the Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Performer in an Animated Program in 1997 and again in 1998, and the series won the Humanitas Prize for children's animation three years running. Ownership passed to Disney in 2001 with the rest of Fox Kids, and the series has never had a US DVD release. Anderson went on to host Family Feud from 1999 to 2002 and won a Primetime Emmy in 2016 for playing Christine Baskets on Baskets. He died in January 2022 at 68, of complications from cancer.