Take Three: I Love Dick

I Love Dick: Season 1, Episode 3 “Scenes from a Marriage” (C-)

I do not love this show. In fact, I really despise it. I had such high hopes for star Kathryn Hahn and her admiring director Jill Soloway, but this show just makes me angry. It’s a mess, first of all, and it’s completely unappealing beyond that. It didn’t take long at all for Chris’ deeply explicit love letters to Dick to get to him, mainly because she dropped them off for him to review, and predictably Sylvere got very angry about it. The whole relationship dynamic between Sylvere and Chris is already very all over the place, and adding his attempt to control her before punctuating it with his actual desire to be controlled by her, as forcefully demonstrated by the episode’s closing scene, only further complicates things. If there was some sort of catharsis or meaning that came from all this, that would be great, but Dick is also a relentlessly boring figure. Devon is so fascinated by everything that Chris has written that she’s essentially living her life through her, and she didn’t even blink at the idea of having been fired because she let her friends be too rowdy in a space that wasn’t hers to disrupt. I don’t feel that this show is going anywhere, and I’m fairly certain that its title is controversial enough that it isn’t likely to pick up a good deal of awards attention for fear of having to print this show’s name anywhere. As a result, I don’t feel any regret giving it up, and I hope to forget about it soon and enjoy the next season of “Transparent” instead.