A half-baked comedy series rewrites the life of the American poet as a defiant feminist who ignores chores and delivers clunky dialogue
Emily Dickinson doesn’t seem like the historical figure most ripe for a feminist revision. The American poet, whose work was published almost entirely after her death, lived a pious life in a stable, publicly invested New England family, wrote mostly in private, and was a recluse for most of her adult life. Dickinson, one of four shows in the freshman class of originals for the Apple TV+ streaming service, launching 1 November, assumedly saw promise in the name brand of one of America’s most famous 19th-century female poets. It mines her life for the strict, defining details – child of a town-figure father (Toby Huss) and cold homemaker mother (an extremely miscast Jane Krakowski) in Amherst, Massachusetts; two siblings'; comfortable home – while shoehorning in the more inconveniently introspective, cerebral, of-her-time personality of the unheralded (in her lifetime) literary trail-blazer.
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Dickinson begins on Apple TV+ on 1 November
