Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker liked it better than Mike did. I haven't seen the show, so I express no opinion. But here's Nussbaum:
Quote:
Elsewhere on Apple TV+, luckily, there’s the sweet surprise of “Dickinson,” which blossoms despite a premise that sounds like a gimmick: Emily Dickinson’s life, as a modern teen comedy. And, to be fair, the pilot is, as the kids say, “a lot,” giving the false impression that it’s a sketch show, like “Drunk History,” a hot take on the poet as a mouthy, death-obsessed feminist badass, scored to songs by Billie Eilish and Mitski.
But keep watching and it quickly becomes clear that, for all the anachronisms and slang (“That is a sick locket,” one character coos, when she receives a necklace), there’s nothing essentially ironic about the production. It’s lovely and sincere, joyful and sensual—and, in its way, richer and more honest about teen-agers than nihilistic contrivances like “Euphoria” or “Riverdale” are. The category it belongs in is not campy teen soaps or costume dramas but playful genre experiments like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “Jane the Virgin,” and “Lady Dynamite,” series that sound silly in theory but are crafted well enough to teach the viewer, liberated from the need to be solemn, how to watch them.
At the show’s heart is Emily’s steamy affair with her future sister-in-law Sue, with whom Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) has her first orgasm, cued to her poem “I Have Never Seen Volcanoes.” But their relationship, which is backed up by recent Dickinson scholarship, isn’t treated as a dirty joke: it’s romantic and, eventually, tragic, an impossible dream in a world where women’s prospects are limited. The other characters, initially cartoonish, begin to feel real, too, including Emily’s vain sister Lavinia and her Whig politician father (a terrific Toby Huss), who has a deep bond with the daughter he has trapped in a box of domesticity. Emily’s goth bravado and her grandiose declarations that she’s a genius are made poignant by t.heir historical context: we know that she’s right, and also that she’ll end up staying at home her whole life, largely unpublished.Things calm down after that, as, episode by episode, the show takes full advantage of its setting, with a freewheeling disrespect for verisimilitude. Emily meets a hypocritical Thoreau (a shirtless John Mulaney) and, later, Louisa May Alcott (a shirty Zosia Mamet). An amateur performance of “Othello” intersects with white teens debating abolition. (“This Shakespeare club has too much drama!”) There are sly references to the Trump era and kids screaming “No spoilers!” while discussing “Bleak House.” The visual design is just as endearing, down to the Monty Python-esque credits and details such as Emily stitching a sampler reading “F My Life.” Niftiest of all, each episode highlights one of Dickinson’s poems, which feel revivified, not merely invoked. The words float onscreen, in Dickinson’s handwriting, glimmering like a spiderweb—the best kind of message from beyond.
Still, the key to the show’s effect is how well it grounds emotion in humor. Created by Alena Smith (a writer for “The Newsroom” and “The Affair” who, full disclosure, is a Twitter acquaintance and the author of witty Twitter feeds like Tween Hobo), “Dickinson” uses its freedom from bio-pic fustiness to get frankly weird. Early on, the Dickinson kids host a bash, about which Emily effuses, “Parties are like shipwrecks. You should emerge from them soaking wet, out of breath and hopelessly disoriented.” We get opium and twerking, cleverly interwoven (you’ll have to take my word for it) with a traditional reel. But there’s also, at the climax, a hallucination of a bee, wagging antennae, whom Emily dances with, deliriously.
|
|