This fall, the quirky half-hour Dickinson, a surreal period dramedy inspired by the life of a young Emily Dickinson, grabbed a couple of unexpected honors: It will be the first Apple TV+ series to earn a second season, as well as being the first Apple series to get a season-three greenlight. The Morning Show and For All Mankind, which gathered Emmy buzz, had to delay their season-two productions thanks to the pandemic. So it’s the show about the poet that’s Apple TV+’s trailblazing debut, a marriage of feminist history and world-dominating luxury tech that is both entirely bizarre and uniquely American.
Apple TV+’s strategy has proven markedly different than the massive libraries touted by other streamers, which heavily augment their original programming with shows they’ve bought the rights for. According to Reelgood, a streaming TV guide, Amazon Prime and Hulu have more than 10 times as much licensed content as original programming. Peacock Premium has nearly 20 times as much. Even Netflix, the great content producer of our era, licenses over half of the television it offers to subscribers. The prevailing wisdom is that quantity should be the business model.
Apple TV+ is, by contrast, a boutique offering. The 30-odd titles on its $5-per-month service are all exclusive originals, save for exactly two: Fraggle Rock, which Apple licensed last May, and the Peanuts specials, including the staple It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, licensed this fall. The cherry-picked choice of the Muppets and Peanuts—both broadly beloved cultural touchstones—underscores Apple’s priorities. At least ideally, Apple TV+ should be a refuge from the inundation of mediocre content, though it hasn’t always played out that way. Even if you liked Morning Show, the reviews for See, for instance, suggest that some of Apple TV+’s content is a little more Zune than iPod.
But Dickinson, the platform’s most remarkable original show, offers a taste of what a slim streaming service devoted to quality might feel like. I’ve watched every episode multiple times to fully grasp the show’s slippery, cheeky tone, which mashes together the poet’s intense sincerity with a highly irreverent upending of period conventions. Dickinson collapses the space between the present and the past, finding commonalities in the social mores, technological advances, and racial tensions of America in the 1850s that thrum with resonance in the roaring millennial ’20s.
As humorous as the show is—in one episode, a spirited Louisa May Alcott, played by Zosia Mamet, proclaims that Nathaniel Hawthorne can “eat a dick”—it is shot through with gothic horror. After all, Dickinson matured, wrote her poetry, and eventually died in the same location—her family’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts. But despite being confined to the domestic sphere, she wasn’t a hermit. In the show, Dickinson is not a shut-in solely expressing herself in oblique poesy but the flesh-and-blood Hailee Steinfeld, a 20-something rebelling against her parents, attending lectures at Amherst College, and flirting with what many scholars have identified as the great erotic obsession of her life, Sue Gilbert (Ella Hunt)—her best friend who, during the first season, becomes her sister-in-law. As many women of the time did, Dickinson called on neighbors, socialized with her peers, went to respectable parties, and participated in baking competitions. Dickinson is not attempting to be accurate, but it breathes convincing life into the cloistered domesticity of the 19th-century American female. In one adventurous episode, the show capitalizes on how opiates were widely available at the time; everyone gets high and then Dickinson slow dances with a large bee (voiced by Jason Mantzoukas). We have no record of Dickinson experimenting with drugs. But Dickinson thrills with the suggestion that she could have.
Creator and showrunner Alena Smith, a Yale Drama School playwright turned TV writer, only had to pitch Dickinson once: Apple heard her three-season plan on a Friday in 2017 and picked up the series for a full season the following Monday. For a first-time showrunner—working with a production company that had just formed, on a platform that had just launched, with a star who had never led a TV show before—it was a whirlwind of “newness,” says Smith.
The pitch always called for contemporary music, which dovetailed with Apple’s historic investment in music. During production for season one, Apple exec David Taylor sent Smith Billie Eilish’s song “Bury a Friend” for her consideration. “I’d never heard of her,” Smith admits, adding, “Hailee knew who she was, of course.” Still, she latched onto the song immediately, connecting Eilish’s morbidity with Dickinson’s own. Other needle drops reflect the show’s range of emotion, from the boisterous party anthem of Lizzo’s “Boys” to the heartrending angst of Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl.” And yes, as it happens, you can stream both on Apple Music. If the Apple brand is about promising us a world pregnant with utopian possibility—and sick beats?—Dickinson slots in nicely.
The second season, which debuts January 8, even picks up a technological thread in the first episode, exploring how Dickinson’s little community is rocked by the advent of a daily newspaper. Their Victorian social media has an electrifying effect—delivering political news to Dickinson’s father (Toby Huss), housewares classifieds to her mother (Jane Krakowski), crass cartoons to her brother, Austin (Adrian Blake Enscoe), and the enticing possibility of publishing her poetry to Dickinson herself. The new season revolves around fame as an organizing theme—a topic relevant to both the literary scene of the 1850s and our insta-celebrity of today. (With impertinence, comedians play hallowed writers—in season one, John Mulaney was Henry David Thoreau, and in season two, Nick Kroll will play Edgar Allan Poe.) What drew Smith to Emily Dickinson was the freewheeling, bold spirit of her poetry—“She clearly did not fit into her own time”—but ultimately, the show is not about delivering a treatise on the writer. “I am writing about what it feels like to be alive now,” says Smith. The period elements that don’t resonate today fall by the wayside, like those awful Victorian women’s hairstyles.