I Love Dick

Heady satire full of humanity, I Love Dick is lovably challenging. [12 May 2017, p.50]

In other hands, I Love Dick could be too much to take, but Gubbins, Soloway and the show’s writers are satisfyingly skeptical of intellectualism, art, the Marfa milieu and the self-absorption that consumes their characters. The show can be quite instructive on the basics of art theory and gender studies, but, at the same time, it also works as a sendup of people susceptible to their own B.S.

I Love Dick will not speak to everyone. But for those inclined or willing to listen, there’s a fascinating story here about the power of art to open our eyes, and the power of an artist to transform herself and the world around her.

The show is often funny and generally entertaining. If you try to study it it can feel elusive, like you need an education in gender studies or art history to appreciate it. But watch it for the actors, story, and cinematography, and you can binge it like any other show.

I Love Dick very much shows as well as tells. ... A series that is completely willing to offend sensibilities while also engaging them.

What’s here is rich and compelling, sure to stir discussion, and a worthy extension of the groundbreaking book that inspired it.

I Love Dick is a scruffy, unpolished work in progress... but there’s a whole lot to love about it.

Absorbing in parts, tedious in others, but Hahn is great.

As a TV show, I Love Dick’s makes the smart choice to lean into the book’s aggression, giving Hahn the freedom to fully let loose. The series embraces every sordid, horny detail of Chris’s desire, staring viewers directly (and often literally) in the face and daring us to blink.

Literature has capitalized on the tensions in I Love Dick for decades, if not centuries. But TV--so often praised these days as being novelistic--has been far less able to capture the true inner turmoil of being a person. This story of wrongheaded lust gets it right.

It’s amusing at times, provocative at times, because I Love Dick often explores the practice of contemporary navel-gazing by satirizing it.

Bacon, Hahn and Griffin Dunne headline a talented cast delivering provocative performances, each enabling the work’s directors to transcend any prescribed notions about episodic structure or storytelling norms.

A weird, fascinating, alternately lovely and funny show.

An extremely smart, wildly eccentric and very adult comedy. And if Bacon is bringing the heat, then Hahn is the aching, searching heart of this series.

I Love Dick is a treasure trove of charged moments, an intriguing dance of provocation, creation, and self-reflection. It digs to the roots of desire with unflinching curiosity. It is a daunting show to step into, with its scathing critiques and blunt personalities. But there is something cleansing and freeing about its unvarnished intimacy.

As much as it may cater to the urbane, feminist literati, this adaptation ultimately succeeds because it recognizes that intellectualism and visceral emotion intersect in fascinating ways.

I Love Dick doesn't have a safe bone in its body, salacious allusion definitely intended.

This half-hour series works like gangbusters part of the time, seems puzzlingly disconnected from its supporting characters at other times, and elsewhere generates a laid-back but mesmerizing energy.

If the first season doesn’t entirely hang together, it’s bracingly risk-taking. At its best, it captures the artistic process in a way that TV rarely does, and it works as a kind of video art itself.

It’s the kind of show I would never begrudge someone for absolutely hating. The only thing I would argue is that you should give it time. Like the works of some of the filmmakers involved in its production, it’s trying to shock and challenge you, and that kind of show can take some time to work for a viewer.

As obsessions go, I Love Dick certainly isn't so compelling as to qualify as the next streaming one; still, the show's approach to Chris' plight and its peculiar triangle feels unique enough to make for a reasonably satisfying binge.

The performances of Hahn and Dunne are strikingly good, all the more so given the emptiness of so much of their dialogue. Their rowdy domestic fights achieve effectiveness almost entirely through this duo’s energetic and witty delivery, not the actual content of what they’re saying to each other. As the series proceeds, it becomes more predictable.

Subversive yet silly, as pretentious as it is provocative. ... This is no ordinary show. Like all self-conscious art, it's bound to be polarizing. [15-28 May 2017, p.17]

A feminist cringe-comedy and, like its horny antiheroine, it’s a train wreck, freely mashing together theory and practice. It’s sometimes beautiful but also, not infrequently, repulsive, a narcissistic spectacle framed as a liberating vision quest.

The screen version does express many of Kraus' philosophical points through lines of dialogue and bits of action, but these seem inserted into the action instead of arising from it. And, apart from Roberta Colindrez as Devon, a local who works for Dick and has creative aspirations of her own, few dimensional characters emerge. Hahn and Dunn are fine actors, but their Chris and Sylvère are annoying from the beginning, and pretty much to the end.

It’s an admirable artistic exercise (an episode consisting entirely of monologues by several female characters is particularly striking) that’s almost never enjoyable to watch.

A tonally baffling story that seems to both ridicule academic pretentiousness and succumb to it. ... The acting is fine all around, with Hahn trying her damnedest to be fierce but flappable, but that doesn’t keep the characters from becoming tiresome.