What is it? A cerebral comedy-drama about a woman discovering who she really is, female artists, and the female gaze, based on Chris Kraus’s slow-burner novel.
Why you’ll love it: Jill Soloway gave Amazon some much-needed original-content kudos with Transparent, and she’s pushing the boundaries further with this, her adaptation of the 1997 cult feminist memoir-novel about a writer’s obsession with a critical theorist. For TV, it’s all been transferred to the desert city of Marfa, Texas, where a large community of artists live and work.
The ever watchable Kathryn Hahn plays Chris, a director with a film about to show at the Venice film festival, who makes a short trip to Marfa with her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), an academic whose subject is the Holocaust. At first, Chris is Sylvere’s anonymous plus one – smugly referred to at one point as the “Holocaust wife” – until she meets Dick (Kevin Bacon), an artist and teacher who ignites a series of wild sexual fantasies that revive her marriage and change the direction of her work. Eventually, she decides to stick around and consider the merits of Dick’s, well, you can guess.
Sarah Gubbins, who co-created the show with Soloway, has acknowledged that the book’s nebulous form made it “an impossible thing” to contemplate adapting, but the pair have pulled it off despite their concerns, thanks to a gleeful sense of visual freedom and an excellent cast. Hahn, who stole the show as Rabbi Raquel on Transparent, fills Chris with just the right levels of brash entitlement and insecurity, and Bacon has a lot to do as Dick, playing out both his own wry storyline as a rugged yet soulful man of the land and the fantasy world Chris imagines him in. And what a fantasy it is – this is grown-up TV about sex and desire and it doesn’t shy away from showing it. It is called I Love Dick, after all.
The series is directed by Andrea Arnold, Kimberly Peirce, Soloway and one man, Jim Frohna, which makes its digs about how people don’t recognise the great work of female directors all the more knowing. It would struggle to be anything but gorgeous in such an arresting setting, but it is spectacular – there’s a sense that almost every shot is good enough to stand up in isolation.
Like Transparent, this is a world of privilege mostly inhabited by obnoxious people, where the punchline of a joke is allowed to be: “Susan Sontag, she was great.” And, like Transparent, its claims to be a comedy are tenuous, although based on the early episodes, it’s more slapstick-leaning, and loosens up as the series progresses. Still, it’s likely to be divisive: it takes a certain willingness to embrace its rarefied world to find the mockery of it entertaining, and some may find it a little pretentious. But it has plenty of charm, is astonishingly beautiful, and it’s exciting to see a TV show that’s willing to try something entirely new.
Where: Amazon Prime
Length: Eight 30-minute episodes, available from 12 May.
Standout episode: Of the three episodes released early, the Andrea Arnold-directed third, Scenes From a Marriage, is a cheerfully chaotic diversion into what happens when Chris’s letters to Dick take on a life of their own.
If you liked I Love Dick, watch: There isn’t a lot like it, but in a similar orbit are Transparent, Easy (Netflix) and One Mississippi (Amazon Prime).
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