In 2019, the new streaming service Apple TV + released a trailer for ‘Dickinson’, which surrounded the story of the enigmatic 19th-century American poet as a contemporary melodrama for young adults, complete with power ballad soundtrack and striking application of the ere ‘Dude’. The series looked ridiculous. Of course I had to look at it.
In the first season, Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) holds an exit with Death (played by rapper Wiz Khalifa), curse out a flashy Henry David Thoreau (John Mulaney) and dancing with a hallucination of a giant bee (Jason Mantzoukas) while on high opium. Yep, I realized, this is ridiculous. Ridiculous brilliant.
Apple TV +’s first amazing series, created by Alena Smith, has the challenge of many English teachers in high school: trying to convince a new generation that a name from American curricula is a carnal person, with passions so urgent like our own, living in a tumultuous time of cultural ferment and political upheaval.
These kinds of attempts can inevitably make you sound like the instructor is pulling up a chair in the back and telling the kids, ‘Let’s rap.’ But Smith and the company have produced a work that, like poetry, is in danger of producing something dazzling – the original story of a literary superhero who is touched, funny and full of feeling, dead serious about his subject, but yet not serious about himself.
“Dickinson” introduces the budding poet in her twenties – a millennial from another millennium – drunk with words and scolds a civilian Amherst family who do not know what to do with her. She was beaten to death (“He’s such a gentleman. Sexy as hell”) and to her brother’s fiancée, Sue (Ella Hunt), to whom the poet wrote in real life.
The series drops you into a version of the 1850s that is so deliberately anachronistic in tone that you might expect someone to sweep an iPhone out of the folds of her gown. Hip-hop bumps on the soundtrack; characters binge “Bleak House” as if it were a Netflix series. (“I’m such an Esther!” Says Emily’s sister, Lavinia, played by Anna Baryshnikov.)
It falters on the brink of ‘Drunk History’ self-parody. (The cast of Jane Krakowski as Emily’s mother briefly makes’ Dickinson ‘look like something her character Jenna Maroney would have played as a cut-off joke on ’30 Rock’.)
But it works, thanks to an exuberant voice, the playfulness of the half-hour episodes and the passion for the protagonist’s verses, which appear on screen as if written in a fire. Steinfeld plays Emily as a funny rebel possessed by forces she only partially understands; it is literary biography in the form of a WB supernatural drama.
During the first season, the poet preserves her powers and teaches them about the challenges for women in the 19th-century literary world through a series of encounters, including a Christmas dinner with the ambitious Louisa May Alcott (Zosia Mamet), who trash-talks Nathaniel Hawthorne, likes to run (“It’s a real fact about me”) and brainstorming the plot for ‘Little Women’, looking for a page browse to ‘catch up on that cash’.
Season 2, of which the first three episodes arrive on Friday, wrestles more directly with the real mystery at the heart of the series. The real Emily Dickinson, as the pilot for the pilot tells us, published only a few poems and spent much of her life alone in her room. Why would a brilliant, driven poet resist fame?
The season opens in 1859 with the arrival of the 1850s glory machine – a newspaper, the Springfield Republican – which hits Amherst like the advent of the internet, with its pages full of politics, trade and gossip.
The newspaper also transforms the idea of literary fame; one press of the press and your words are before thousands. His cocky, sloppy soft editor, Samuel Holmes (Finn Jones), is interested in publishing Emily’s work.
To viewers of the influencer generation, for whom attention is a good advantage, that it did not end a happy eternity of literary fame, suggests that something must have gone wrong – Emily should have been held back.
And yes, she’s still dealing with an ophthalmologist she visits for eye strain (James Urbaniak), who laughs when she tells him she’s a writer: ‘You might want to stop doing so much of it!’ (On the other hand, her lawyer-politician father, a pleasantly stuffy Toby Huss, is gradually appreciating, or not understanding, his daughter’s word addiction.)
But the season suggests that Emily’s retreat was also an inside job. She begins to see visions of a haunted young man introducing himself as ‘Nobody’, the personification of perhaps her most famous poem, a rejection of publicity. “Fame is not real,” he says. “It will use you. It will destroy you. ”
Does she hear her own voice here, or the outside world? All those signs in her verses – does that represent a breathtaking rush to be heard? – or a longing for the silences that fall between words? Emily seems to become more self-doubting as a person, even though she becomes more confident as an artist; the doubt, Dickinson suggests, may be inseparable from her art.
The spinner of the Nobody Appearance makes Season 2, though still funny, a more serious and haunting outing. So too the progress of real history as the civil war approaches.
Emily’s poetry feels increasingly séance-like, as if using her intense images (all the split dresses and anxieties) in wild forces that will soon be lost in the land. The season also uses the approach of war to build up the abolitionist black characters, though their stories still feel peripheral among the privileged white New Englanders of the program.
Viewers and scholars can, of course, argue about the accuracy of ‘Dickinson’. (Suppose the giant bee is fictional.) But I am more interested in his ideas about history, freedom, creativity than a wild gift and a kind of drug. In addition, as “Dickinson” himself says in the opening of Season 2, there is little hard documentation from this period in the poet’s life.
It frees this program to take poetic license – to tell the version of the truth, but to tell it strangely, delightfully obliquely.