There are times during the first few episodes of Dickinson when you suspect you're watching something extremely clever, a wielding of anachronistic storytelling gimmicks so smart that the series may even be genius—or, at the very least, thrilling and new. In the three episodes of the new Apple TV+ series that were released to critics, out Friday along with the rest of the new streaming service’s offerings, those moments are disappointingly fleeting.
Lovingly (I think) crowned the “horny Emily Dickinson” series on social media following the release of its trailer, the new comedy (I think) stars the brilliant Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit, Edge of Seventeen, the shitty Pitch Perfect sequels) as the brilliant late poet, whose work only gained recognition after her death in 1886. (The wide-ranging tone is its own “wild night” here.)
We meet her as a young, strong-minded woman whose writer’s itch needs constant scratching and whose jonesing for the buzz of independence is severely harshed by her politician father and conservative mother. She lets her mind escape to erotic fantasies in which she has intimate conversations with Death, played by Wiz Khalifa smoking blunts in a horsedrawn carriage towed by two spooky ghost horses, and indulges her hormones in secret trysts with her best friend, Sue (Ella Hunt)—possible real, true love that is complicated by the fact that Sue is engaged to her older brother.
Mostly, though, she escapes to her writing—her salvation and where she can express her feelings for Sue, her preoccupation with death, and her exasperation over her lot in life: being a woman in a patriarchal society. She is in the throes of writing, up at 4 a.m. with divine inspiration, when the series begins. A knock at the door interrupts her. It’s time for her morning chores: fetching the water. She has to get it because her brother is, well, a boy. Chores are for the women. When her sister reminds her of this, Emily is pissed. “This is such bullshit,” she deadpans.
We’re meant to be jarred from the get-go. This is Emily Dickinson. This is the 1800s. This is corsets and petticoats and decorum and propriety and all those things that signal a certain kind of filmmaking and storytelling, as we’ve been conditioned to expect from countless TV shows and movies.
But there is rap music, and music video-style directing. Emily and her friends say things like “this is bullshit” and “I’m pretty psyched about it” and “yo, I run this town!” And because it bears repeating, there is Wiz Khalifa in a Victorian top hat playing Death.
Is there a montage set to to Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy?” Do I even need to answer that question?
As avant-garde as its storytelling approach is, conceptually it’s almost literal.
Emily Dickinson, at least this version of Emily as played by Steinfeld, is feisty and spunky and rebellious and scoffs loudly at convention. When Death tells her that she’s going to be immortal, she rejects the idea. “Immortality is nothing. All it takes is being very good and well-behaved, and then you go to heaven,” she says. “See, that’s not the kind I mean,” Death replies. “Your type of immortality won’t come from you following the rules. It’s going to come from you breaking them.”
Dickinson, you see, is breaking the rules of how a story like Emily’s is told. Get it???
As far as plots go, the one in Dickinson is rather thin, which is actually fine. It makes it more of a pleasure to spend time with the characters—chiefly Steinfeld as Emily. The young actress has a commanding, sardonic-sweet screen presence, and she’s fantastic casting in this.
There’s also Jane Krakowski, more restrained than we’re used to seeing, as her mother, desperate for Emily to stop fooling around, settle down, get married, and become a housewife. Toby Huss plays Daddy Dickinson, a man torn between his admiration for his daughter’s free spirit and his devout belief about the “proper place of women,” as he wrote in an actual published essay. (Spoiler: It’s not in lecture halls or in the pages of literary journals!) “My God, you will ruin the name of Dickinson!” he bellows when she tries to publish a poem, which simultaneously acts as sort of a meta dare for this show as well.
Her brother, Austin (Adrian Enscoe), has thin patience for his sister’s rambunctiousness. Her put-upon younger sister, Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov), evolves into some entertaining comic relief. Then there’s Sue, who Emily sneaks long kisses with, commiserates over period pain with (Period talk! In a period piece!), shares her secrets and ambitions with, and who gives Emily her first orgasm.
There are ostensibly good ideas here. It’s hardly the first time modern sensibilities were brought to a period piece to make the material sexier and more provocative, if not resonant. As an Emily Dickinson origin story, of sorts, it’s a clever approach. How better to give a megaphone to her feminist bona fides, as relevant today as they were then, by setting them to a Lizzo song?
But things are too mishmashed. There’s too little continuity, or rhyme or reason, for what elements are period-accurate and what gets cheekily updated to today. Things are bonkers and fun at first, then repetitive and exhausting. How accurate all this is to Dickinson’s life, of course, is right alongside convention, being tossed out the window.
It’s an interesting addition to the first suite of projects for Apple TV+, in that it doesn’t necessarily give any sense of creative identity for the new streaming service, yet makes an audacious case for why it’s worth subscribing to. It’s an attempt to say, “This is something you won’t get anywhere else.” Except for the fact that you can’t shake the feeling that you could get this somewhere else: on The CW.
“This is provocative and adventurous and perhaps why there should be a streaming service that takes risks for a series like this to live on,” you think at first, as if you’d ever think things like that. Then minutes later, you think, “Oh wait, this is actually... insane??!!” And later yet, even, “Actually, this is maybe a little boring.”
Mostly though, it begs my favorite unanswerable question: Who is this for? The teens whose culture is appropriated likely don’t know enough about Emily Dickinson to understand why this approach is so saucy, and those who are most interested in learning more about her may not be amused or have the patience. That’s the fatal risk of a series like this. In the era of #TooMuchTV, which Apple TV+ is only exacerbating, patience is a scarce commodity.
