The Surreal TV Show That Rewrote Emily Dickinson’s Story
In Dickinson’s third and final season, the titular poet (played by Hailee Steinfeld) travels forward in time and meets the author Sylvia Plath (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman). Sylvia, it turns out, has a deep knowledge of her predecessor’s legacy. Apparently, Emily Dickinson lived a “miserable life,” should be considered “the original sad girl,” and, Sylvia whispers scandalously, “was a lesbian.” A strange scene such as this could happen only on Apple TV+’s fantastically surreal cult hit. The show takes an unusual approach to depicting its protagonist’s coming-of-age in the 1800s: Characters speak in Millennial parlance, the soundtrack is populated with today’s hits, and more often than not scenes resemble fever dreams where what’s figurative in Emily’s poems gets depicted literally.
, which airs its series finale today, belongs of anachronistic period pieces. Following films such as and , the show and others like it observe the past through a distinctly contemporary lens. Yet compared with similar projects such as and , was less interested in rewriting history; instead, it zoomed in on a single character’s life. It spent three seasons recontextualizing Emily Dickinson’s reputation as an avatar for creative recluses, asking how a woman who so vividly captured the spectrum of human emotion with her words came to be known only as a depressed shut-in. In probing this riddle, pushed the boundaries of anachronistic storytelling—and became one of the most audacious series on TV.
