“I always knew that that was going to culminate in a season that would take place in the Civil War because the Civil War are the years in which Emily rose to her greatest heights as a poet and really stepped into her power fully,” Smith says. The third and final season centers on the Civil War years, which were Emily’s most productive time but also emotionally challenging as she not only has deep feelings about the violence and death of battle (which in great part fueled her work), but also experiences a divided within her family, with her father (Toby Huss) and brother (Adrian Enscoe) on opposite sides. The first season of “Dickinson” followed Emily as she began to come into her own with who she was as a queer woman and as a writer, while the second season focused on her intersection with fame - not only if she wanted to share her work with the world, but also how.
She ended up signing an overall deal with Apple TV Plus that same year. Her instincts proved fruitful though: “Dickinson” picked up a Peabody Award and a GLAAD Media Award in 2020. This type of schedule meant Smith couldn’t allow her initial vision to be influenced by audience response even if she - or Apple - wanted it to be.
Production was underway on Season 2 when Season 1 finally began streaming.
Emily gets this title of ‘the original sad girl’ and there’s something in that she is somebody who could sit down and write about anything and every possible feeling she was feeling and articulate it in a way that either made sense to you or it didn’t, and she owned that,” Steinfeld continues.Īpple TV Plus believed in the show, too - so much so that it renewed it for a second season in October 2019, before audiences had watched a full episode. “I was just excited to, in a way, set the record straight. And so, it felt like the perfect opportunity,” Steinfeld recalls. I was so blown away by the first two scripts of the first season that I read and I wanted to be a part of this show in more ways than one. “With ‘Dickinson,’ there was an element of being a part of getting this thing off the ground and helping develop it.
It also came with a star on the rise in actor and executive producer Hailee Steinfeld, who had broken out in “True Grit” and went onto films including “Pitch Perfect 2,” “Pitch Perfect 3” and “Bumblebee.” Its home was new, but the show came with the pedigree of strong behind-the-scenes TV talent in Smith, who had previously working “The Newsroom” and “The Affair,” as well as writer and executive producer Darlene Hunt (“90210,” “The Big C”) and companies Anonymous Content and Paul Lee’s Wiip. 1, 2019, as one of the few shows to launch with the Apple TV Plus service. “Dickinson,” which begins its third and final season Nov. Inspired by her love of Dickinson’s work, Smith wanted to “bust open this myth of Emily as a depressive, shy, anemic person and to say, ‘No, this was a woman with a great sense of humor and a ton of passion and fire, who - really even within the limitations imposed upon her by her very conservative society - carved out the agency that it took to make one of the greatest bodies of work that has ever been written in the English language.” Smith’s vision was always to “reframe and reimagine the origin story of America’s greatest female poet,” which she did by diving more deeply into her personal life - from her family to her sexuality.