I Love Dick was —by a wide fucking mile— the best show on television in 2017. If they don’t win some kind of an Emmy or Golden Globe for episode 5, A Short History of Weird Girls, then there’s really no point in anything anymore.
I’m sure Jill Soloway and everyone involved would be horrified to know that someone like me thinks their work is genius, but here we are. That episode in particular is such a triumph that I’m torn between being inspired by it and despondent that I’ll never write anything that good.
Thoughts:
I’ve always disliked Griffin Dunne’s characters, but Sylvere is his crowning achievement in a lifetime of determined unlikability. Sylvere’s a near-perfect distillation of everything that’s quietly insufferable about ostensibly enlightened men; the dude seriously makes my skin crawl in a few scenes. He’s a weak, sniveling little shit who only starts acting like a man when he’s alone in a room with a woman half his age. He’s also the utterer of perhaps the most pathetically unsexy thing a man has ever said to a woman during a handjob: “Your hands are so strong.” Ugh, man. Ugh.
Has anyone ever had a more varied, apparently enjoyable career than Kevin Bacon? He shook his ass for fame in the ‘80s, pivoted into character acting for a couple decades, rented himself out for fun garbage like The Following, and now he’s been cast as the hipster-cowboy personification of Profound Manliness at 59 years old. What a trip.
Kathryn Hahn is great at a certain kind of brusque, fast-talking, pushy comedy, so I didn’t really foresee how she would look when stripped down, literally and figuratively. Turns out, her vulnerability is beautiful. She really digs in and plays with the erotic aspects of humiliation, expertly conveying the way Chris’s obsession with and awkward pursuit of Dick feeds on itself; every poorly delivered rejoinder, every ill-timed decision, and every embarrassing mishap simply makes his attention more of a necessity. Needless to say, the whole thing is right up my alley.
But my favorite part of Weird Girls comes via Lily Mojekwu, whose character spends the first four eps hanging around the edges of scenes, reacting to other people and serving as functional glue for the plot. It seems like a bit part, at best. And then out of nowhere, in episode 5, she’s revealed as a complex, funny, interesting black woman who’s navigating a web of personal frustrations that have been entirely invisible to the white people watching. Television doesn’t get more metaphorically rich than that, folks.
