Dickinson

Fan fiction may not be the best way to describe Dickinson, but I think it captures the overall adoration of the poet that went into the making of this show. ... All of this is pretty engaging. But then at seemingly random moments Dickinson shape-shifts into a sitcom, and that’s where it loses me.

Steinfeld is good, the cast too and the show is not terrible either. What it's forgotten is that while we're all free to make Emily Dickinson into whoever we want, at least make her interesting. Emily deserves as much.

The mishmash of tone and slang give Dickinson an endearingly weird energy. And Steinfeld is already such a bundle of charisma that she papers over some of the sillier choices. Does Dickinson capture the spirit of its title character? Not really. Is it a good show? Probably not. But it’s at least more interesting than most of Apple’s bland freshman class.

As far as plots go, the one in Dickinson is rather thin, which is actually fine. It makes it more of a pleasure to spend time with the characters—chiefly Steinfeld as Emily. The young actress has a commanding, sardonic-sweet screen presence, and she’s fantastic casting in this. ... But things are too mishmashed. There’s too little continuity, or rhyme or reason, for what elements are period-accurate and what gets cheekily updated to today. Things are bonkers and fun at first, then repetitive and exhausting.

Acting saves many moments that “Dickinson” otherwise drowns in distracting stylistic flourishes. Maybe the most frustrating part of the first few episodes is how close they get to connecting Emily’s spirit to that of her poetry before losing the thread.

There’s little trace of the wondrous and luminously sad Dickinson many teens encounter in high school curriculums in this show that seems to be going for coming-of-age comedy but lands somewhere between skit and revisionist biography.

Steinfeld is an appealing young star, but she deserves a better vehicle than this one. As Dickinson wrote, "Hope is the thing with feathers." It will take more than that to get "Dickinson" off the ground.