Jill Soloway’s pilot for her TV adaptation of Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick wooed critics with its surprisingly dextrous take on seemingly adaptation-proof material. The 1997 novel — which exploded in popularity in the early 2010s — exists very much in internalized abstraction: the book is a hybrid of fiction and memoir, written in a diaristic third-then-first-person voice, from the point of view of Kraus, the author-as-character, who writes about her obsession with sociologist/critic Dick Hebdige (who’s never given a last name in the book) following a “conceptual fuck” they share over dinner with her husband.
The cult feminist favorite, which skewers academia and centers on a journey of female-gazing obsession, seemed hard to adapt not only because of its interiority, but also because of the legacy it carries at only 20 years old. But Soloway has built quite a legacy herself already with Transparent, and from the trailer Amazon just released, it looks like Kraus fans and newcomers alike will have a lot to look forward to — not least of which is Kathryn Hahn performing a tour de force of neurotic/erotic fantasizing, and Kevin Bacon as the dickish Dick doing things like shirtlessly holding a lamb while Hahn’s voiceover describes him as the “Roman God bringing the spirit of sex into our lives.”
The series premieres on Amazon on May 12. If you already caught the pilot, you might have noted some of the major, superficial differences between the novel and the series — particularly that Kraus’s initial encounter with Dick (heh) is not set in the Los Angeles-adjacent Pasadena, but rather the small artist community of Marfa, Texas (which makes the fact that the Kraus character is there for her husband a bit more stifling).
The series follows Chris as she realizes she’ll be stuck with her husband in Marfa during her husband Sylvère’s academic residency, lead by Dick. Her intent is initially to leave for the Venice International Film Festival, but she gets into licensing trouble over unauthorized use of a song, and the screening is canceled. Per Amazon’s official description, “Chris finds herself stranded in a small town with nothing to do but confront her failing artistic career.”
Watch the red band trailer: