In Amazon s new sex comedy I Love Dick, the protagonist, Chris Kraus, played by Kathryn Hahn, becomes wildly obsessed with a mysterious man part cowboy, part artist by the name of Dick. The camera itself, however, remains entirely fixed on Kraus.

Like the characters around her, viewers are glued to Kraus every move, watching a strong womans willful unraveling with a mix of fascination, horror and reverence. The way she tousles her hair with a bit too much muscle, like some sort of seductive metalhead. How she punctuates her jerky dance moves with overly carefree yelps and howls. Or how she occasionally makes additional use of random, long, solid objects by running them ever so gently between her legs.

The particular gaze with which the camera savors Kraus and Hahns every move is one many women viewers will identify with. Its the admiring gaze women reserve for one another when attempting to understand who a person has made herself into and how and why. A way of looking that considers women to be smart, sexual, messed up and striving to be better, a perspective not often seen on screen.

Jill Soloway, the shows creator, is known for bringing this particular kind of female gaze to mainstream television doing for instant streaming what writer Chris Kraus herself did for writing in her 1995 semi-autobiographical manifesto I Love Dick, on which the show is based.

Soloways I Love Dick follows Kraus as she accompanies her husband, Sylvere (Griffin Dunne), a Holocaust scholar, to a fellowship in the solidly trippy town of Marfa, Texas. There, Kraus meets Dick played by Kevin Bacon a scruffy, silent type, a land art sculptor who possesses deep appreciation for straight lines and large, concrete phalluses. Dick awakens something inside Kraus: desire, an eruption of excess energy that is not only sexual but creative, personal and political.

Fueled by her hunger for Dick, Kraus begins to describe his influence on her body and brain in a slew of love letters, each beginning Dear Dick, turning the archetypal male artist into her very own rugged muse. One reads: Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social. Even the books title, I Love Dick, positions Kraus as the subject, Dick as the object.

Kraus lust stimulates her creative drive, transforming the former failed filmmaker into, to quote Kraus, a female monster, a woman who boldly wreaks havoc on her life without remorse or apology, who uses her emotions and impulses as impetus for art. Art supersedes whats personal, the book reads, and Kraus lives this truth unabashedly, as her piles of love letters transform into a revolutionary declaration of female irrepressibility.

While Dick becomes a muse for Kraus, Hahn is something of a muse for Soloway. Except instead of zooming in on misty, love-sick eyes or lengthy legs, Soloway keeps her lens fixed on Hahns delectable self-destruction, frenzied artistic innovation and virtuoso horniness.

I think she is a muse for me in the same way De Niro is a muse for Scorsese, Soloway explained in an interview with HuffPost.

She has this clownish relationship to her body when it comes to sex, she continued. You know, its that awkward moment where you are supposed to be sexy but you are just too much in your head. As a physical comedian, she reminds me of Charlie Chaplin.

Soloway first worked with Hahn in her 2014 series Transparent; Hahn plays Rabbi Raquel, a bastion of sanity juxtaposed against the dependably unholy Pfefferman family. But even as the shows faithful dose of vanilla, a breath of normalcy amongst the selfish havoc, Rabbi Raquel is never one-dimensional. She is ethical, yes, but shes goofy, flawed, romantic and confused as a result, shes one of the most beloved characters in the stellar ensemble cast.

When Transparent was happening, I was always like, Kathryn needs her own show, Soloway recalled. I thought, If I do another show Hahn will be the lead.

Its hard to think of a better role for Hahn than that of Chris Kraus who not only resembles her physically, but offers the actor endless opportunities for physical absurdity and emotional complexity through breathless rants, fevered sex and searing works of art.

Chris Kraus is a kind of like Philip Roth for women, Soloway explained. The more Dick ignores her, the more turned on she gets. What heroic, female TV character has ever admitted that? There are these things we women are supposed to keep secret, in service of male protagonists. The female gaze allows us to have our own version of our reality.

The first time Hahn read Kraus I Love Dick, she felt an intense connection with the writer and protagonist. Many women creatives do. Her writing got under my skin, Hahn told HuffPost. I couldnt believe how similar some of our behaviors were, how fast our motors ran.

While getting into character, Hahn took pleasure in how far Kraus pushed and how giddily she relinquished control over her identity and her life. In the normal romantic comedy, Hahn said, Chris would flirt by getting dressed up, doing everything Dick asked, being quiet and demure, and waiting for him to look at her. But no, she just keeps going further and further. It is so cathartic to see someone moving forward into her own abjection. There is something so cringeworthy and delicious about it.