NYWIFT Blog

#SummerHours TV Episodes to Watch: I Love Dick: “A Short History of Weird Girls”

Goodbye, winter caps—hello, summer hats! It’s that glorious time of year where many of us can switch from content creators to content consumers. NYWIFT members Mellini Kantayya and Kathryn O’Kane have put together #SummerHours, a series of fun summer books, movies, and TV shows by or about women.


By Kathryn O’Kane

Under this salacious title lies a feminist narrative about a floundering indie filmmaker who becomes obsessed with a cowboy artist named Dick. Kathryn Hahn plays Chris, a woman at a crossroads in her career struggling to find meaning in her life. Hahn, long relegated to the role of the “wacky best friend,” shines with the physicality of Lucille Ball and a vulnerability all her own in this breakout role. And Kevin Bacon is Dick. Bacon acknowledged that traditional gender objectification is flipped in this series, and he revealed in an interview with Marc Maron that his wife Kyra Sedgewick pushed him into the role. “Oh, you’re doing it,” she said.

I love dick.png

Kathryn Hahn as Chris and Kevin Bacon as Dick in I Love Dick for Amazon (2017)

The series as a whole defies categorization. Yes, they are comedic half-hour episodes, but it’s not exactly a sitcom. As the AV Club put it: “It’s a serialized narrative and something that feels unmoored from traditional storytelling. It’s isolating and strange and very, very female. It’s not for everyone, but everyone should give it a try.”

The episode to watch is “A Short History of Weird Girls,” directed by Jill Soloway. First person backstories of the four main female characters offer insight into the motivations of these wildly disparate personalities. For each woman, Dick represents something different. He’s a sex fantasy, a rival, a father figure, or a role model. As each woman tells her story, the narrator cleverly appears as the witness of her memory, the moment when the seeds of her own obsession were planted.

I Love Dick is streaming on Amazon Prime.

 

(Cover photo by Bridgette Matthews)
PUBLISHED BY

busyk

busyk Kathryn O’Kane is a director and producer with over 20 years of experience in television and advertising. She directed season 2 of the Emmy nominated series The World According to Jeff Goldblum for Disney+. She was the showrunner of the James Beard award-winning Netflix series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, and she produced six seasons of the Emmy award-winning series Friday Night Tykes. Her episodes of Iconoclasts for Sundance and Oprah Presents Masterclass for OWN have won NAACP Imagine awards. Kathryn has crafted short form narratives as diverse as Mission Juno for NASA, segments of AMC’s Talking Dead, and commercial assignments for Apple, Meta, United Airlines, and SAP. Kathryn served two terms on the board of New York Women in Film and Television, championing equal pay, diversity and inclusion, and safety in the workplace. She is a member of the Directors Guild of America and Television Academy. Learn more at www.busyk.com.

View all posts by busyk

2 Comments

Mellini_Kantayya

Now I *have* to check out the show, and this episode in particular!

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