Amazon Releases 3 Pilots: Vote for ‘Tick’ and ‘Dick’

Ken Tucker
·Critic-at-Large, Yahoo Entertainment
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Photos: Amazon Studios

Amazon is doing that thing again where they post pilots for you to watch and vote on — you help determine which shows continue to get made. (Yes, you are partially responsible for keeping Hand of God in production.) Starting Aug. 19, you can go over to Amazon, resist the temptation to order another bag of tube socks, and watch three new shows: a reboot of The Tick; a Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle called Jean-Claude Van Johnson; and a half-hour starring Kevin Bacon, Kathryn Hahn, and Griffin Dunne with the intentionally regrettable title I Love Dick.

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Dick first. This thing is very promising: Dunne and Hahn play a married couple, a writer and a filmmaker respectively, who move to the arty enclave of Marfa, Texas, where Dunne’s character has a fellowship to finish writing a book and to take counsel with a creative-writing guru played by Bacon — the Dick of the title. Based on the in-some-quarters-revered 1997 novel of the same name by Chris Kaus, Dick has coolness behind it: Transparent’s Jill Soloway directed and executive-produced the pilot, which was written by playwright Sarah Gubbins. Hahn gets to play a complex woman who is attracted to Dick while also navigating her own sense of identity in a new context: She’s in Marfa because of her husband, but she resists being defined as “the writer’s wife.” You want to get more of the inner life of Hahn’s character, Chris, but the half-hour is over just as it’s scratching her surface. I wanted more. Which is good, I suppose, as a tease, but doesn’t give you any sense whether, if picked up, I Love Dick will continue to be good. So I’ll root for its pickup, to see more of how Hahn, Bacon, Dunne, and Soloway pull this off.

Related: ‘The Tick’: First Look Photos of the Amazon Revival

The Tick is another reimagining of the comic-book character created by Ben Edmunds, and you’re damn right I loved the 2001 Patrick Warburton, Fox network version of the big blue superhero. The new version stars Guardians of the Galaxy’s Peter Serafinowicz in the title role — Warburton is among the show’s producers, as are Edmunds and (also from the older show) Barry Sonnenfeld. In other words, this Tick is in loving, knowledgeable hands.

This is a different Tick, however. It’s not as jam-packed with jokes, something that takes a little getting used to. But by the end of the half-hour, I was admiring the way everyone involved has managed to find a new way to present a superhero show: It’s action-packed but lighthearted, more frequently witty than guffaw-hilarious. In making inevitable comparisons to current comic-book TV shows, it’s not as sunny as The Flash nor as dark as Daredevil. It can convey true menace as well as fast-moving daffiness. And it has Jackie Earle Haley as its chief villain, The Terror, complementing Serafinowicz’s clever performance. So I really want to see more of The Tick.

Last and least is Jean-Claude Van Johnson, in which Van Damme plays a version of himself as an aging action hero who’s also a secret agent who uses the code name “Johnson.” (Not to be confused with “Dick.”)

Van Damme is charming in his willingness to parody his public image, but the show is a one-joke item: Are we expected to watch a whole season of episodes featuring Van Damme leaving a movie set to go and fight crime while cracking self-deprecating jokes? I’m not much interested in that. Nice running gag about the similarities between Time Cop and Looper, though.

I Love Dick, The Tick, and Jean-Claude Van Johnson start streaming Friday on Amazon.