Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I wanted so badly to dig this show. I grew up loving films with Bacon and Dunne, and Kathryn Hahn is terrific in everything she does. I'm not going to lie, she's terrific in this too. They all are. Which is why it's so painful that Chris and Sylvere (Hahn and Dunne's characters, respectively) are so god-awfully obnoxious in this half-hour pilot about two New York artists who travel to Texas so Dunne can take a creator's workshop led by Bacon's famed professor, the eponymous "Dick". This is NOT a comedy. It's "comedy", in quotes, as made by artists for consumption by critics. It's cruelty and bitterness masquerading as catharsis, and it mistakes ugliness and anger for depth. Sylvere is pretentious, and wildly so. We learn this in full when he sits by a koi pond, chatting up a red-head, explaining to her that he's writing a novel about the Holocaust, because "something new is afoot with [it]". He's tired and apathetic in his marriage to Chris, willing to muster up enough effort to offer sex without any real passion until he feels jealous. Chris, an independent filmmaker who dislikes herself and her husband in seemingly equal measures, is a neurotic mess, a Woody Allen character without any of the charm his earliest films portrayed. She loses a film slot in a foreign festival she submitted to because she refused to pay royalties to artists for a song she used, and proceeds to have a mini-breakdown. Early on we're treated to a scene where she stands in the middle of a dingy kitchen at dawn, miserable as she rubs her crotch with a long-reach, click-trigger butane lighter. Because ennui, y'know. She's frustrated and mean, bitter and sardonic, with no real redeeming qualities. It makes for great material for Dunne and Hahn to act out, but it's pure torture for anyone who doesn't enjoy watching ugly people be ugly. Bacon's professor Dick gets a pass because he's an enigma in this pilot. He's meant to be the guiding light that both of these unhappy souls are inexorably drawn to. If I thought this show was about repairing an unhappy couple, even if they wind up separating, I might stick with it. But this is 'art'. And 'art' as portrayed by independent cinema is far more often about realizing that you're a terrible person, everyone around you is terrible, and things are just going to kind of stay that way, because 'hey, that's life, now please give us awards'. It is a miserable, well-acted show that will only get more punishing if it gets the green light for a series. No, thanks. Not for me.