Dickinson is the wildest, weirdest and most earnest show on Apple TV+

The Verge

"If The Morning Show is Apple TV+’ crown-jewel prestige drama and See is its bet on sci-fi programming, Dickinson is its most fun," says Julie Alexander. "Circumventing Apple’s idea of what a prestigious show should look like brings some much needed carefreeness to the streaming platform." Alexander adds: "Dickinson doesn’t have the boundary-pushing vulnerability of Euphoria, HBO’s popular teen drama that aired over the summer, but it’s unabashed in its admiration for youth culture. Teens in Dickinson are unapologetically teens. Relationships are intoxicating, self-discovery is angst-ridden, and the future is full of endless possibilities built on beautifully reckless dreams only teenagers can have."

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• Dickinson offers hope that experimental and creative shows aren't dead: "The eccentric writer dances to hip-hop at raucous parties, experiments with opium, sleeps with her brother’s fiancée and dismisses the patriarchy as 'bunk,'" says Lorraine Ali. "Heretical as it sounds, this revisionist take on the revered literary figure captures the essence of a woman born before her time, struggling for independence, driven by the need to write. The series is a smart, funny, irreverent ride — a coming-of-age comedy fused with a rich costume drama."
• Dickinson isn't horny enough -- it's The Favourite by way of Disney Channel, filtered through a TikTok algorithm: "Trailers for Dickinson promised an interesting — specifically, horny — new take on what is sort of a staid genre," says Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz. "Those teases offered a slate of attractive teens in corsets and breeches. There was a strong suggestion of passionate romance, and there was most certainly sex, as evidenced by an errant hand trailing over a bare thigh. It all looked very hot. Unfortunately, Dickinson is so caught up its trying-to-be-hip–ness that it forgets to be clever, let alone interesting, let alone horny. What you get instead is The Favourite by way of Disney Channel, filtered through a TikTok algorithm. And this is what the algorithm spits out: Hailee Steinfeld in 20-something-minute episodes; a soundtrack that is mostly Lizzo and SoundCloud; Wiz Khalifa; a house-party scene à la Project X; a bit of dialogue about women’s rights that best resembles this ridiculous line from the trailer for The Aeronauts."
• Dickinson somehow succeeds in combining a period tale with the unabashedly modern tone of Drunk History: "If there is anything tempting about playing Emily either too reverently or as a reflection of more dated assumptions (to put it plainly, like a creepy recluse), Dickinson succumbs to none of it," says Shannon Miller. "Instead, Steinfeld easily taps into a free-spirited, occasionally odd young woman with a serviceable social life and the same bratty tendencies that many young people might recognize from their own adolescence. If there are certain beats that feel repetitive, it could have less to do with a lack of inventiveness and more with the show’s nascency, and there’s enough variety between the first three episodes for our assumptions to lean towards the latter."
• Dickinson is a prime example of the “Who F*cks Industrial Complex": "It’s part queer teen romance, part silly literary revisionism, part high-school comedy, and part pure absurdism," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "It’s also yet one more example of what my colleague Bilge Ebiri described as the 'Who F*cks Industrial Complex,' a wave of entertainment that works by taking characters like Archie, Nancy Drew, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and reimagining them as people with sex lives. They are human beings with functioning endocrine systems. They are people with desires that extend beyond mere hand-holding and an occasional peck on the cheek. The inherent appeal of the Who F*cks genre is the way it rehabilitates familiar figures, taking characters who’d been stuck in airless, inhuman stories, and reframing them as fully dimensional, flawed people. It’s related to the superhero-origin-story trend, another way to rewind a particular narrative about who a person is and retell the story in a way that takes trauma or grief more seriously. (Superhero origin stories, for whatever reason, almost never emphasize the Who F*cks element. It’s always Who Broods Endlessly Rather Than Having Productive Conversations With a Therapist.)"
• Dickinson is delightfully absurd: "If you’re into subtlety, Dickinson is not the show for you," says Claire Spellberg. "Apple TV+’s new dramedy starring Hailee Steinfeld as a young Emily Dickinson attempts to put a modern-day spin on the poet’s story, and it does so at breakneck speed. While it’s easy to get lost in Dickinson‘s funhouse of bizarre plot points, dialogue, and musical cues, the show’s 'Sure, why not?' attitude encourages audiences to keep watching, even at its most ridiculous moments. As it turns out, if you say yes to everything — including every thought that pops into your writers’ heads — you end up crafting a show that contains something for everyone."
• Dickinson feels like a half-baked high school project: "There’s little trace of the wondrous and luminously sad Dickinson many teens encounter in high school curriculums in this show that seems to be going for coming-of-age comedy but lands somewhere between skit and revisionist biography," says Adrian Horton. "Not that there’s anything wrong with straying far from period accuracy – the success, warmth, and absurd goofiness of Drunk History, which imparts far more emotional truth from history than its stunt premise would initially suggest, says otherwise. But Apple’s take on this zaniness feels half-baked; the set-up has the feel of a high-school project with unlimited wells of money and ambition, layering thin paeans of slogan feminism (versions of 'well-behaved women seldom make history,' many times over) and modern diction over the broad contours of a historical figure’s life."
• This is a flat, weird and mean take on an American icon: Dickinson, says Alexis Nedd, "is a confused, disrespectful mess that manages to turn an American literary icon into a paint-by-numbers influencer whose 'not like the other girls' energy renders her portrayal borderline unwatchable. The show attempts to make a point about the intellectual and social repression of women, factors that clearly influenced Dickinson’s work in her time, but instead props the poet up as an example of what happens when creators decide there’s only one authentic way to be a woman. The root of the show’s issue is its main character. Dickinson goes to great lengths to remind the audience that 16-year-old Emily, played by Hailee Steinfeld, is destined for greatness, but does so by writing her in hypermodern contrast to the rest of the women on the show."
• Watching Dickinson is a strange experience: "For all the big creative swings the new Apple TV+ series takes, it feels suspended between several different approaches without committing to a single one," says Caroline Framke. "It’s not a comedy, nor a drama, nor even quite a “dramedy.” It’s at least adjacent to a teen show in the vein of a high school series you might find on the CW, until it’s not. It’s not parody, nor entirely sincere. It’s possible to find a unique space amidst all the set categories within television, but at least in its first three episodes, Dickinson has trouble doing so outside its basic premise, which boils down to, 'what if Emily Dickinson could literally call ‘bullsh*t’ on the patriarchy?' If at one point Emily (played by executive producer Hailee Steinfeld) emerged from her stately Amherst home in a Forever 21 shirt emblazoned with “#FEMINIST,” it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising."
• Dickinson comes off as a reductive, overly metaphoric and pseudo-feminist appropriation of Dickinson's biography: "The writing is well-informed by historical research, with episodes based on many real events from her early life," says Robyn Bahr. "But in wanting to be both a serious teen drama and a black comedy simultaneously, the half-hour show instead comes off as tonally incongruous, awash in wry hipster flatness. Irony, though, is a tool — not a genre... When Dickinson does work, it's mainly due to Steinfeld's loose, irreverent tenacity and the organic eroticism shared between her Emily and Hunt's Sue, based on the probable real-life relationship Dickinson shared with her sister-in-law. (I did find some humor in a scene where a frustrated Emily must peel away at her many sartorial layers to confirm she's had her period.) At the same time, I couldn't help but wonder what the show would be like if the producers had embraced a more eccentric quality in Emily and had hired a comedic actor to play her."
• Deeply weird Dickinson pulses with tender attention to the tropes of teen soaps: "This program is a curious creature!" says Troy Patterson. "Its existence a perplexity! Absurd but sincere, pop but abstruse, Dickinson pulses with tender attention to the tropes of teen soaps. Wrought on the level of speculative fan fiction, the show—one of many new offerings from Apple TV+—imagines the young Emily Dickinson coming of age in antebellum Massachusetts, like a figure in some emo Brontë fever dream. Under earlier models of cultural production, Dickinson, created by Alena Smith, might have developed into something like a legendary spec script or a cult-favorite failed pilot. But Cupertino seems unafraid to invest in niche content."
• Jane Krakowski and Toby Huss took a long road trip together after being cast as Emily's parents
• Creator Alena Smith was interested in Emiliy Dickinson having a fluid sexuality: "I'm very interested in the idea that sexuality in the 1850s didn't have the same categories that we have today," say Smith. "And perhaps there was a kind of freedom and maybe a resonance with a generation coming of age today that also is freeing itself from certain boxes around gender and sexuality."
• Smith sees a parallel between Emily Dickinson and Billie Eilish: "We used a couple of Billie Eilish songs on the soundtrack," says Smith. "I've heard this phrase that Billie Eilish's music has been described as 'gloom pop.' I think that is the right phrase for the aesthetic of Dickinson as well. I think we live in a gloom pop moment."
• Smith likes that Dickinson is referred to as "Sexy Dickinson": “I am obsessed with that,” Smith said of the nickname, “because I think that one of the things that we hopefully are getting to explore right now about Dickinson is that first image of her that was put out into the world by her first editors.… They had a motivation of making her out to be this sort of virginal spinster who wore a white dress and shut herself in. And that’s not who she was; it’s not who anyone really is. I mean, especially not a poet who is just bursting with desire.”
• Why is Emily Dickinson all the rage?: “I don’t think there’s a hotter American poet right now,” says English professor Christopher Benfey. “In a way, having a billboard of her in Times Square makes perfect sense.”