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Kevin Bacon Returns To Television Courtesy Of Amazon’s Original Comedy Series ‘I Love Dick’

By Lawrence Arboleda
Published on: 00:39 PST, Apr 19, 2016

Kevin Bacon is set to return to the small screen thanks to Jill Soloway’s comedy TV series I Love Dick, which will be aired via Amazon’s streaming service.

Bacon has been talking with the show’s producers for a little over the month, according to Deadline. Jill Soloway, the co-creator of Transparent, announced the project early this year, but the streaming service confirmed the actor’s role in the show today.

I Love Dick is based on a Chris Kraus novel, which tells the story of Chris and Sylvere, a struggling couple from Marfa, Texas, who became obsessed with an enigmatic professor named Dick. The professor will be played by Kevin. With Dick often described as a “sexy silver fox” and a “cowboy intellectual,” the role seems perfect for Kevin Bacon’s sensibilities as an actor, considering his glib charm and unique charisma.

Kevin Bacon is no stranger to taking on oddball roles, and if the reputation of the original material is any indication, the Footloose actor will have many opportunities to shine. With Kevin teaming up with an award-winning director like Jill Soloway, who is known for her work on Six Feet Under and the Amazon original television series Transparent, I Love Dick should offer something unique in the comedy genre.

Here’s the plot’s synopsis as detailed by Deadline.

“I Love Dick is set in a colorful academic community in Marfa, Texas. It centers on a struggling married couple, failing wife and independent filmmaker Chris (Hahn) and Sylvere, and their mutual obsession with an off-putting but charismatic professor, Dick (Bacon). Through that obsession, Chris goes on a journey of self-discovery and eventually transformative power. Told in Rashomon-style shifts of POV, I Love Dick charts the unraveling of a marriage, the awakening of an artist and the reluctant deification of a man named Dick.”

Jezebel’s Jia Tolentino also described the show’s thematic and aesthetic goals in great length.

“The subject—female longing and obsession and performance of such—is taken to an absolute theoretical extreme and placed in the structural center. It defends itself intrinsically, and develops a startlingly muscular, electric life of its own.”

I Love Dick is a novel known for its penetrating insight and twisted humor and is often described by literary critics as one of the most important books in the last century.

The book is known for insightful passages like the one below.

“No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form.”

In February, Soloway announced that Kathryn Hahn will be playing Chris, who is the main protagonist in the comedy series. The actor who will play Chris’ husband, Sylvere, is yet to be cast.

The acting project will be Kevin Bacon’s return to the small screen after a three-year acting gig for The Following, which started in 2013 and ended last year. EW also broke the news that Kevin will be reprising his role in a possible TV series based on the science fiction movie Tremors. It also makes sense on account of the fact that Bacon is returning to the role after 25 years.

Kevin said earlier this year that he’d embrace the opportunity to play Valentine McKee again after all these years.

“I’d love to do something else with Tremors and revisit the character 25 years later,” Bacon said. “Part of what’s great about that movie is there are next to no digital effects. The monsters are done with puppetry, and it’s still off, funny and scary — it’s a cool accomplishment.”

Are you excited to see Kevin Bacon take on the role of Dick in I Love Dick?

[Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP Images]

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