Dickinson premiere review: A show worth kindly stopping for

AppleTV+’s new period comedy/drama about the famous American poet Emily Dickinson is charming, weird and absolutely worth your time.

For period drama fans, 2019 has already been a pretty great year. We got a Downton Abbey movie, for starters. And on the small screen, there are more diverse, intriguing and genre-defying costume dramas than ever before. Shows like Gentleman Jack, Harlots, The Spanish Princess and Catherine the Great have been successfully pushing back against established tropes and expectations, telling different sorts of stories than we’re used to getting in this genre. From focusing on female perspectives and centering traditionally marginalized characters, there are more lenses than ever with which to consider the past.

AppleTV+’s new comedy/drama series Dickinson is simply the latest in this line. Much like 2019 Best Picture The Favourite, this series puts a modern-day spin on the idea of the costume drama, using present-day slang and hip-hop music to help tell the story of one of the greatest poets of all time. Here, Emily Dickinson is imagined as a rebellious millennial hero figure, who rejects the life of marriage and children she’s told by her family to want. Instead, she wants to be one of the greatest writers the world has ever seen. Which, you know, she will be. One day.

Dickinson is part teen drama and part magical realist fantasy, with a bit of queer romance and a lot of overt silliness thrown on top. It’s not going to be a series for everyone, because it is, in fact, extremely weird, but for those It works for, it’ll be one of the best things you watch this year.

Hailee Steinfeld shines as the young Emily, who longs for a life in which she can make her own choices, like publishing her poetry or being in love with the best friend who’s suddenly set to marry her brother Austin.

The first episode of the series is largely dedicated to introducing Emily and her family, her parents who don’t understand her, her elder brother who’s never asked to take responsibility for anything, and the younger sister who seems all too willing to give up her future for the life she’s supposed to be living. Emily is neither of those things, and instead spends her time scribbling poetry on scraps of paper, trying to avoid marriage proposals from local boys shoved in front of her by her mother, and mooning over a romantic personification of Death played by none other than Wiz Khalifa.

There’s something extremely appealing about Dickinson’s interpretation of its subject – about the fact that the show takes such open glee in making the assumed hidden life of Emily so overtly textual, and allowing her weirdo inner self to literally run free all around her. Dickinson – both the real and fictional versions – was always a woman ahead of her time, and who wore the time in which she lived poorly.

This is, of course, not what you would call a pitch-perfect accurate representation of Dickinson’s life – though certain elements of the story are, of course, true.

Emily probably did have a romantic relationship of some type with her sister-in-law. The real Dickinson never really left the boundaries of Amherst town in which she was born. She was something of a recluse. She rarely left her father’s house. And she only published 12 poems in her lifetime, with thousands of scraps of writing discovered in a trunk after her death. But the rest of Dickinson is made of nothing sort of guesses, speculation and wish fulfillment. And yet…there’s something that nevertheless feels accurate in this depiction of a wistful, unruly young woman who wanted so much more than the world thought she was supposed to be able to have.

Whether or not the modern-day framework will continue to feel as fresh and exciting as it does here for the rest of the series’ first season is unclear.  But for the moment, everything feels just right. The anachronistic touches, playful tone and sly winking at prescribed social and gender balances is fun and appealing, and the show itself comes off as 19th century Connecticut by way of both Gentleman Jack and Marie Antoinette.

It’s easy to tell within the series’ first thirty-minute installment that Dickinson is a story of Emily with something to say. It’s confident, lush and feels almost fully formed in its own strangeness, a pulsing story of creativity, passion,and energy that stands on its own pretty much immediately. That’s a rare thing for any pilot, let alone one as strikingly strange as this one is. Where will Dickinson go from here? Anywhere and everywhere feels like a pretty good guess.

All episodes of Dickinson are now streaming on AppleTV+.