Dee Reynolds: The Most Relatable Member of the Gang

Meet Dee

Sweet Dee Reynolds — born a few minutes after her twin brother Dennis, and treated ever since as though those few minutes were the entirety of her claim on the world's attention. She is the only woman in the core Gang, a co-owner of Paddy's Pub, an aspiring actress, and, by the show's own repeated insistence, the designated punching bag of the entire ensemble.

Her defining sin, if we must name one, is envy. She wants what Dennis has — respect, attention, the casual assumption that her ambitions are worth taking seriously. She wants what Charlie and Mac have — brotherhood, belonging, the sense that her presence matters to someone. She wants what she was promised, somewhere along the way, that effort and talent would eventually be rewarded.

But Dee's defining wound is different from her sin. Her wound is being overlooked. Constantly. Systematically. By her brother, her friends, her father, the world. The show mines this for comedy — her flailing arms when she laughs too hard, her endless failed auditions, the nicknames ("Bird," said with contempt) — and it is funny. It is also, if you sit with it even briefly, genuinely sad.

Dee is not the worst person in Paddy's Pub. That is a high bar, and she clears it with room to spare. She is capable of real cruelty, real selfishness, real moral collapse. She is a full member of the Gang, and the Gang does awful things. But she is also the one who most often tries — tries to connect, tries to grow, tries to be something — and is rewarded for her trying with mockery, dismissal, and the occasional dead pigeon thrown at her head.

She is, in other words, the most human member of the Gang. And that makes her the hardest to watch.

Dee and LDS Women: A Careful Parallel

I want to write this section carefully, because I love the Church and I love the women in it, and I think both of those things require honesty.

The LDS Church has, from its earliest days, spoken with genuine reverence about women. The Relief Society is the oldest and largest women's organization in the world. Prophets have declared, repeatedly and sincerely, that women are essential, valued, beloved of Heavenly Father, and that their influence is irreplaceable. I believe these declarations are sincerely meant.

And yet. The institutional structures of the Church — the priesthood lines of authority, the decision-making bodies, the public-facing leadership — have historically been closed to women. Women have been told, with warmth and conviction, that their role is sacred, while the definition of that role has been handed down rather than negotiated. A woman who felt called to lead, to teach men, to hold institutional power, was told — kindly, lovingly — that her calling lay elsewhere.

Dee Reynolds was told her role too. She was Dennis's twin sister. She was a woman in a bar full of men who had known her since childhood. She was told, through a thousand small daily dismissals, what she was and what she wasn't. And she resisted — not always wisely, not always gracefully, often in ways that made things worse — and found that the secular world she fled toward was no more welcoming than the one she came from. Hollywood didn't want her. The Gang didn't respect her. She traded one set of limits for another and called it freedom.

I am not saying the Church is Paddy's Pub. I am not saying this to be unkind to either Dee or to the women who find deep joy and genuine fulfillment within their LDS roles — because many do, and their experience is real and valid and should not be dismissed.

I am saying that Dee's story — the story of a woman who was assigned a place, who resisted it, who found no better place waiting for her on the other side — is recognizable to more LDS women than we might be comfortable admitting. That recognition is worth something. It is worth sitting with.

Sister missionaries who came home and found that the institutional doors they'd knocked on for eighteen months were still closed to them understand something about Dee. Women who have sat in ward councils and watched their input politely noted and then set aside understand something about Dee. The answer is not to abandon the Church. But the answer also cannot be to pretend the recognition isn't there.

Dee's Strengths (That the Show Keeps Punishing)

Here is something the show wants you to laugh at and simultaneously sneak past you: Dee is often the most competent person in the room.

She is a genuinely skilled physical comedian — the actress playing her, Kaitlin Olson, is extraordinary, and Dee's embodied performance gifts are real within the world of the show too. She can do voices, hold characters, commit to a bit in ways the men around her cannot. When she is given space to perform, she is actually good. The show punishes her for this by having her audiences walk out, by having her "success" turn out to be a delusion, by having her strengths undercut at every turn by circumstance or the Gang's sabotage.

She is also, more often than the others, the one who notices when something is ethically wrong. She does not always act on this — she is part of the Gang, after all, and she descends into their schemes alongside them — but the flicker of conscience is more visible in Dee than in Dennis, Charlie, or Frank. She is not a good person. But she is a person who wants to be good, or at least wants to be seen as good, which is at least one step closer to goodness than not caring at all.

She shows more empathy. She forms more genuine connections — briefly, imperfectly, always eventually collapsing — but she tries. She is interested in other people in a way Dennis simply is not.

The show's treatment of Dee is, the writers have acknowledged, a sustained dark joke about how women in comedy are undermined and dismissed. They intended it as critique. Whether it lands as critique or simply as participation is a reasonable question. But within the text: Dee has gifts. They are real. They are consistently overlooked and undermined. If this were a story about a woman in an LDS ward rather than a bar in South Philadelphia, we would recognize the shape of it immediately.

What Dee Needed

Here is the thing about Dee that separates her, theologically, from someone like Dennis: she is reachable.

Dennis shows every clinical marker of a person whose capacity for genuine human connection has been severely damaged, possibly beyond repair. I say this with real sadness and without judgment — he is the product of a genuinely terrible upbringing, and the show is honest about this even while it plays it for laughs. But Dennis, at his core, does not seem to want connection. He wants control. He wants admiration. He does not, in any meaningful sense, want to be known.

Dee wants to be known. Desperately. Painfully. That want is the engine of most of her bad behavior — the lying, the scheming, the grasping — but it is also the thing that could save her. You cannot reach someone who does not want to be reached. Dee is reaching constantly. She is reaching in the wrong directions, toward the wrong people, with increasingly frantic and self-defeating methods. But the reach is there.

What Dee needed was genuine community. Not a bar full of people who have known her since childhood and have calcified their contempt for her into habit. A community that encountered her fresh, assessed her fairly, and decided she was worth knowing.

She needed genuine affirmation — not flattery, not the empty praise she sometimes receives from strangers who don't know her well enough to dismiss her, but the kind of affirmation that comes from being truly seen and truly valued. The kind that says: we know your flaws, and we think you're worth it anyway.

She needed a place where her gifts were used. Where her performance abilities, her empathy, her eye for human behavior — the things she has in abundance — were asked for and received and celebrated.

A good ward could have been that place. I don't say this naively. I know that wards are full of people who are also broken and also struggling and also capable of the same dismissiveness the Gang shows Dee. But the design of the community — the covenant to mourn with those who mourn, to bear one another's burdens, to be genuinely interested in each other's spiritual flourishing — that design is what Dee needed. She needed people who were covenanted to her wellbeing.

She got Mac, Dennis, Charlie, and Frank instead.

Dee as Mirror

Watching how the Gang treats Dee is uncomfortable in a specific way. It is not the discomfort of watching strangers be awful to each other. It is the discomfort of recognition.

Because communities — all communities, including religious ones, including ours — can develop patterns of dismissal that become invisible through repetition. A woman's comment in council gets noted and passed over. An ambitious sister is steered, gently, back toward the nursery. A young woman's testimony is praised for its sweetness and not its substance. No one is being cruel. Everyone would be horrified to be compared to Dennis Reynolds. And yet the effect, accumulated over years, can feel remarkably like being told you are the Bird.

This is not the whole story of the Church. It is not even most of the story. The Church has given women genuine power, genuine community, genuine transformation. The Relief Society has saved lives — temporal and spiritual. The women I know who are most fully alive in their faith are not diminished by it. They are enlarged.

But Dee is a mirror, and mirrors are useful precisely because they show us what we might not choose to see. The question she asks — without meaning to, without the show intending it as a theological question — is: what does your community do with the woman who keeps reaching?

The Gospel's answer, at its best and truest, is: you reach back.

That is the hope. That is the whole point. We are not the Gang. We do not have to be.