Dickinson Season 2 was a very modern feat in creative storytelling

Los Angeles Times

"Dickinson is many things: a period drama, an irreverent millennial comedy, an eccentric family sitcom, a wildly imaginative feminist series and one of Apple TV+'s riskier productions," says Lorraine Ali. "In its second season, which concludes Friday, the 21st-century love letter to a 19th-century poet has proven itself a very modern feat in creative storytelling. And storytelling it is. There isn’t a lot known about the inner life of the revered American poet, a recluse who never married and for whom fame arrived decades after her death. The meticulously researched half-hour series, from creator and showrunner Alena Smith, fills in those blanks with real and imagined details about the young writer’s life at home in Amherst, Mass., with her dysfunctional family, diverse circle of friends and taboo love interests. The young folks may wear ribbons in their hair and top hats on their heads, but they speak in present-day slang, greeting one another with a hearty 'What up!' Season 2 continues the wild exercise over 10 episodes, earnestly honoring Dickinson’s poetry by bringing it to the fore while bending Victorian values and period-piece conventions into pop art."

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• Dickinson is spooky and bold, solemn and arch: Creator Alena Smith "seems less interested in the historical Dickinson than in a sort of personification of her authorial voice, played by Hailee Steinfeld," says Katy Waldman. "That voice, Smith said recently, 'embraces paradox and defies authority.' Focusing there allows the show’s Emily to be more subversive than she was in life—to espouse, for instance, feminist and anti-racist beliefs. The of-the-moment accents—Mitski cues, Serial jokes—serve an eerier argument: that Dickinson’s poems are startlingly modern, and that they have always conversed with a future that is suddenly here."
• How Anna Baryshnikov pulled off the wild "Spider Dance"
• Alena Smith and her stars break down the Season 2 finale