"Dickinson" got a second chance. It paid off.
In the Streaming Era, shows like Dickinson prove it's still worth it for creators, and audiences, to take risks.
Dickinson was always going to be a risky undertaking, as would be any TV series attempting as many unconventional elements as this one.
The Apple TV+ series, which finished its third and final season in December, tells the story of the great American poet Emily Dickinson in the late antebellum and Civil War era. This, however, is not the Emily Dickinson you’ll have learned about in high school English. The series is chock-full of anachronisms. The soundtrack features exclusively modern artists — everyone from Billie Eilish to Lizzo to Maggie Rogers to Taylor Swift — and the dialogue is riddled with Gen-Z slang.
The characters’ worldviews have been modernized as well. Racism is oft-discussed in the show, especially as the Civil War looms, but the way it is talked about feels wholly contemporary. In one scene in the third season, the show satirizes how white progressives struggle to discuss race, depicting a white Union colonel trying to explain to a Black character the struggles of forming an all-Black regiment: “If my soldiers don't learn to read and write — Ah, shoot, there I go again. Not ‘my soldiers,’ that's paternalistic. I'm really trying to police my language. Ah, not ‘police,’ patrol — No, that's problematic as well. Damn!”
Queerness is given a similar treatment. Emily’s most consistent love interest is her sister-in-law, Sue Gilbert, who she likely had a love affair with in real life. Interestingly, though, their queer identities, although kept secret, are never discussed as a source of tension. Instead, they’ve accepted it, and the dramatic tension comes from their struggle to form a healthy relationship.
Perhaps the show’s greatest risk is it’s stern commitment to artistic liberty regarding the facts of Dickinson’s life. That’s not to say the show is untruthful; it is very much grounded in the general facts of her life and the reality of the time period. The costumes and sets are faithful to the era, and unlike other anachronistic period-pieces, Dickinson does not opt for color-blind casting, and instead uses the race of its characters to drive important conversations. Rather, the show doesn’t get bogged down in details, and instead weaves a narrative that works for its own goals. In doing so, Dickinson makes itself clear: this is not a 19th-century story. This is a 21st-century story that happens to be set in the 19th-century.
Anachronism in period pieces is, of course, nothing new (although there does seem to be a renaissance of the idea lately, with shows like Bridgerton and The Great finding success in this mode). Dickinson, however, is anachronism on steroids, and manages to strike a tone that sets it apart from the rest.
There’s an alternate universe where all these artistic risks don’t pay off — where Dickinson crumbles under the weight of its own creativity. Luckily, that isn’t the case here. Dickinson — eventually — finds a way to make it all work.
The series does not find success right out of the gate, though — it stumbles for most of its first season before finally getting its bearings. Within the first ten minutes of the first episode, the problems are clear: the modern dialogue is a bit too inconsistent, and often feels forced, and there are far too many moments where the show can’t seem to figure out its own tone. But there are also moments, even in the first episode, where the sheer creativity is so admirable that it keeps you interested.
By the start of the second season, Dickinson finds its footing. Gone is the clunky dialogue and tonal confusion. What’s left is an entrancing thematic arc about fame, hope, family, legacy, and a nation in disarray. Even more impressive is that the show keeps you entranced not with plot, but with its characters and emotional movements. The series is designed like a jukebox musical, with Dickinson’s poems organized into a thematic arc tying each season together. I’ll admit that I never fully understood or appreciated Emily Dickinson’s poetry when I read her in high school, but Dickinson is highly effective at providing a framework to understand the poet’s most famous work, so when “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” or “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” appeared in the show, they sent shivers down my spine.
In centering Dickinson’s poems as the driving force behind the show, the series says a lot about how we interact with art. For over a century, scholars have been obsessed with trying to understand the cultural and personal context in which Emily Dickinson wrote her works. Dickinson suggests one explanation, but also cares a lot less about the facts and more about the questions that the art raises today. That is perhaps the central thesis of the show: that we can learn more by asking what these poems mean for us today than what they meant for Emily back then. The show — like her poems — tells us more about ourselves than about her.
It’s upsetting, then, that the series takes so long to be as effective as it does. I’ll confess that when the first season of Dickinson premiered in 2019 to so-so reviews, I gave it a pass. I believed there was simply too much high-quality content to consume to waste time on a show that critics deemed interesting but imperfect. It was only after the second and third seasons received critical praise that I decided to give the show a chance. Even while watching the first season, I almost had to force myself to keep watching during the cringiest moments, under the “promise” that the latter seasons would be worth the wait. Indeed, they were.
In the pre-streaming era, maybe that would have been fine. Creators expected audiences to join in on a series as word-of-mouth spread, and they operated under the assumption that not all viewers had seen the first episodes. For all intents and purposes, a lackluster first season with a lot of potential could realistically get a second chance at popularity (see: Parks and Recreation). Today, I’m not sure shows have the same luxury. Viewers on streaming services will almost always start with the first episode, and reviews of the first season often dictate how much press a show will get going forward. Even though Dickinson’s second and third seasons were met with universal praise, the show still receives little discussion outside of year-end lists, especially compared to Apple TV+’s breakout hit Ted Lasso. It’s a disappointing consequence of the streaming era.
Still, Dickinson is proof that a second chance can pay off. Streaming services (and audiences): take note.