Dickinson gets a lot wrong, but it gets the most important thing right

Slate

"I’m an English professor, and I study, write about, and teach Emily Dickinson’s poetry," says Johanna Winant, who teaches at West Virginia University. "And Dickinson’s version of Dickinson is pretty close to my Emily Dickinson: the one I know not through her biography but through her poetry. The show isn’t entirely accurate, but that doesn’t mean it’s not truthful." Winant adds: "What I like best is the show’s willingness to be strange and surprising to the point of being nonsensical and displeasing. Its outright anachronisms—some twerking at a house party, lots of contemporary slang, a cool soundtrack—could be seen as making a supposedly stuffy classic palatable in the vein of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, or an attempt to translate 19th century Amherst, Massachusetts, for 21st century audiences. But there’s too much of it, and it’s too overt. The willfully modern dialogue and music juxtaposed with the perfect period-specific setting might initially make a contemporary audience comfortable, but its charm grates and it never stops being surprising. The show jolts; its pacing is unpredictable; its timing is odd. It makes you gasp, and then laugh. The show embraces the surreal, sometimes in funny ways and sometimes in creepy ones. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if it was trying to be funny or creepy, and that made it funnier and creepier."

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• Dickinson is stranger and more charming than it has any right to be: "Here is a show that looks at Emily Dickinson—one of the greatest poets in American literature, a woman infatuated with death and dying, queer and forced to hide or kill her own desires, a near-recluse for many years and dead at 55—and asks the question: What if Emily Dickinson was in fact 100% That Bitch?, says Philippa Snow, adding: "To put it more succinctly: Dickinson is like The Favourite, retooled either for the YA audience of Gossip Girl, or for literature nerds looking to tune in, turn off, and drop out. Whether or not this sounds like your personal idea of a good time will depend on several factors, not limited to your age, your interest in messing with history, and your belief in the sanctity of literary figures and their lives. Dickinson’s framing of its heroine as a trailblazing feminist is at times curiously adjacent to what is defined as 'girlboss feminism,' meaning a very specific brand of activism that relies on being sassy, brash, and unapologetic, and on owning branded merchandise that says things like 'YASS KWEEN' or 'FEMINIST A.F.'"
• How Dickinson blew up the period piece: "The truth is that the choice to make a period show was a way of writing a stylized version of the present,” says creator Alena Smith, who studied Emily Dickinson for years. “Why Emily Dickinson works as a figure to put at the center of this type of style is because Emily Dickinson was an artist who was ahead of her time and did not follow all the rules of her time and was certainly not appreciated in her time.” She adds: “I always was trying to create this uncanny blur between present and past so that you’d almost lose track of which one you were in.”
• Dickinson is the first show made specifically for literary weirdos: "The first moment I suspected that Dickinson was somehow sneaking into my room at night and stealing my deepest unspoken desires from the dark recesses of my brain was in episode three," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "Emily, high on opium while at a house party, gets her period and collapses in despair. She drags herself across the room like she’s dying, and then stuffs her sister’s handmade cat pillow between her legs because the idea of going downstairs for an actual sanitary napkin is just too hard. This was when I suspected that the show was, in fact, coming specifically for me. And then it got even better."
• How historically accurate is Dickinson? Did Emily Dickinson actually get high on opium?
• Dickinson creator Alena Smith: Billie Eilish is the modern Emily Dickinson
• If Emily Dickinson were alive today, she'd love Billie Eilish