E4 LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR
“Orange Is the New Black”)
are behind us and it’s safe
fare from here forward.
Apple can’t answer the
debate once and for all, but if
“Dickinson” is any indica-
tion, the bar for experimen-
tal and creative productions
may still be rising.
The half-hour series is in-
deed about the great Ameri-
can poet Emily, but don’t ex-
pect a “Masterpiece Thea-
ter”-style ode to antebellum-
era comportment. In Apple’s
dark comedy, Emily (played
by Hailee Steinfeld) spends
zero time shut in the parlor
listening to the tick-tock of a
clock, or counting dust parti-
cles.
Instead, the eccentric
writer dances to hip-hop at
raucous parties, experi-
ments with opium, sleeps
with her brother’s fiancée
and dismisses the patriarchy
as “bunk.”
Heretical as it sounds,
this revisionist take on the
revered literary figure cap-
tures the essence of a woman
born before her time, strug-
gling for independence, driv-
en by the need to write.
The series is a smart,
funny, irreverent ride — a
coming-of-age comedy fused
with a rich costume drama.
Formal dances are accompa-
nied by a techo/pop/emo/rap
soundtrack; Dickinson’s
parents (Jane Krakowski
and Toby Huss) speak in
stiff, period-specific lan-
guage while all the teens, in-
cluding Dickinson herself,
use modern slang: “That’s
the coolest!” “Why are you
such a freak?”
The constrained young
woman also has a secret re-
lationship with Death, who’s
played by Wiz Khalifa in a
top hat and black gloves.
They go for midnight rides in
his ghost carriage, during
which she laments her sta-
tion in life as a woman.
“When will you come and
take me from this place? I’m
ruining the family name,”
she says.
“My darling. You’ll be the
only Dickinson they talk
about in 200 years. I promise
you that,” he answers. Es-caping a cloistered girl’s life
has never been this lively.
Dickinson lives in
Amherst, Mass., with her
family, including her tough
but vain younger sister, La-
vinia (Anna Baryshnikov),
and handsome but unim-
pressive brother, Austin
(Adrian Enscoe). Her best
friend is Sue Gilbert (Ella
Hunt), who also happens to
be her love interest —
though they’re soon to be-
come sisters-in-law. So
much for life being simplerback then. Krakowski is an
oddly perfect fit for Dickin-
son’s mother, playing it
straight as she talks about
her love of housework. “I’d
rather scrape the skin off my
fingers than get a maid,” she
protests.
She wants her willful
daughter to be just like her:
an expert cleaner and cook.
Too bad for Mom that her
daughter is the only young
woman in a historical come-
dy bold enough to call BS —
literally — when she’s com-manded to fetch water or
bake bread and her brother
is not.
And though Emily has
sabotaged all of Mrs. Dickin-
son’s attempts to marry off
her daughter, Mom still tries.
“A male suitor is coming,”
she says.
“Great. Who is he this
time?” Emily grumps.
“A pig farmer from South
Hadley.”
“Yum, sexy,” she snarks.
“Dickinson,” created by
Alena Smith, doesn’t go intoDickinson’s adult life, which
history has recorded as
somewhat tragic. Un-
married, she holed up in her
father’s home, rarely step-
ping outside her bedroom,
and wrote a trunk’s worth of
poetry. Her work was not
published until four years af-
ter her death.
Instead, Apple’s uncon-
ventional look at an uncon-
ventional woman — and
American icon — allows her
another story. Here, she’s an
outspoken free spirit, dis-
obeying her father’s com-
mands in order to compose
her famous verse, and in
turn rebelling against a soci-
ety that wants nothing more
from her gender than babies,
a clean home and hot meals.
The gendered injustice in
Dickinson’s world is stagger-
ing, as are the discussions
about slavery as an industry.
Despite all the clever humor,
“Dickinson” does cut
straight to the more dis-
tressing aspects of a society
that still hasn’t fully resolved
those problems, or even be-
come enlightened enough to
admit them.
Most of all, though,
“Dickinson” is a fiery, playful
and pointed love letter to a
troubled soul. You won’t be
able to write her off as “the
belle of Amherst” again.Apple’s raucous love letter to literary great
THE IRREVERENT“Dickinson” depicts a free-spirited Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) rebelling against society.Michael ParmeleeAppleTV+Apple TV+ has launched
upon the streaming seas of
television, and out front of
the flotilla is “The Morning
Show,” about a network
morning show, called “The
Morning Show,” in the wake
of a sexual misconduct scan-
dal. It’s a timely subject,
whose timeliness is proving
sadly timeless — especially
with former “Today” co-host
Matt Lauer, very much a
model for Steve Carell’s
Mitch Kessler, back in the
news, refuting claims in Ro-
nan Farrow’s recently
published “Catch and Kill:
Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy
to Protect Predators.” (It is
not “about” Lauer. There are
lot of models out there.)
Reported to have cost as
much as $15 million an epi-
sode (a figure disputed by di-
rector and executive pro-
ducer Mimi Leder), its cast is
led by Jennifer Aniston and
Carell — TV actors who be-
came movie stars and are
back on television because
TV is now as good as movies
— and Reese Witherspoon —
who got famous in movies
and moved to TV, producing,
starring in and taking home
an Emmy for HBO’s “Big Lit-
tle Lies.” (Fun fact: She ap-
peared twice on Aniston’s
“Friends.”)
Mitch and Aniston’s Alex
Levy are 15 years into a part-
nership as co-anchors when
the series begins. Almost im-
mediately, amid press re-
ports of misconduct, he’s
fired, leaving “The Morning
Show” just at the moment a
suit from the network’s en-
tertainment business side —
Billy Crudup’s Cory Ellison
— is brought in to run the
news department. Cory has
some ideas, and if he reminds
you at all of a contemporary
“Batman” villain — “Chaos,
it’s the new cocaine,” he says
of his management style —
you are not alone. Because I
thought that too.
Meanwhile, Wither-
spoon’s Bradley Jackson — a
West Virginia news reporter
whose righteous hot temper,
captured on a stranger’s cell-
phone, has launched her into
viral fame, and into the midst
of a “Morning Show” power
struggle — stumbles into a
reluctant, wary partnership
with Alex. It’s a little like “All
About Eve” with a reverse
double twist. Wary partners,
of course, are the amino ac-
ids from which a third of tele-
vision stories are built.
Up until a day before the
Friday premiere, only the
first three episodes, out of 10,
were available to review;
many reviews were written
off them, and though it
wasn’t hard to see that some-
thing interesting was hap-
pening, it wasn’t clear ex-
actly what — especially as re-
garded Carell’s character. We
have seen those careers end,
in the world around us, fol-
lowed in some cases by at-
tempts to revive them, with
varying degrees of success.
Mitch spends those first
episodes mostly in his big
house, raging in self-pity and
sounding worse when he
tries to sound reasonable. It
wouldn’t surprise me to learn
that every line of that dia-
logue had been cut and
pasted from the actual expla-
nations and justifications of
men in Mitch’s situation. He
seems to run through themall: “I didn’t rape anybody. I
didn’t fire anybody”; “Every-
thing’s changed, but they for-
got to send me the memo”;
“It was consensual — most of
them came on to me.” (This
has the paradoxical effect,
not inappropriate to the mo-
ment, of sounding less than
authentic.)
As the series goes on — I
have watched it to the end
now — Carell works to make
Mitch human; there’s an in-
teresting moment in the
third episode, meant to draw
a line between Mitch’s self-
entitlement and something
more perverse, that seems to
indicate a possibility of
growth, but basically, he’s
toxic. (“I haven’t liked you for
a while,” says his wife, off to
the Hamptons with the kids
on the way to a divorce, and,though we have just met him,
we agree.) It’s possibly a fail-
ing of “The Morning Show”
that we never see what any-
one liked about him in the
first place — the man they
thought they knew. But tox-
icity is what “The Morning
Show” requires of him, as it
requires Witherspoon to be a
terrier, getting her teeth into
something and not letting
go.
Alex, on the other hand,
has the advantage of being
played by Aniston, America’s
sweetheart, so when her hus-
band (Jack Davenport) ac-
cuses her of being a “charm-
ing narcissist,” all we really
hear is “charming.” We natu-
rally take her side, against
the network, against her vol-
atile-nice-guy producer
(Mark Duplass), against
Bradley, against Mitch, even
if she is being quixotic or fool-
ish or unfair. Aniston’s own
charm can get in the way of
seeing how good an actress
she really is; she summons all
sorts of winds here, weak and
strong, hot and cold; she’s anencyclopedia of moods and
emotions.
One aspect of the show
that requires a little adjust-
ment is that it has assembled
a cast of actors skilled in
comedy — not just the leads
but support that includes
Duplass, Ian Gomez, Nestor
Carbonell and Fred Melam-
ed and significant appear-
ances by Martin Short,
Mindy Kaling and Brett But-
ler — and given them no com-
edy to play. There are times
the merest change in empha-
sis might turn a scene comic,
but this appears to have been
intentionally avoided; per-
haps it was deemed disre-
spectful to the subject. And
yet the show is not weighed
down by solemnity; it’s fleet,
propulsive.
Hovering over the series
is the walking-and-talking
ghost of Aaron Sorkin — yes,
yes, he’s still alive, whatever
— who has created three
shows about television (live
television, for that matter):
“Sports Night,” “Studio 60 on
the Sunset Strip” and “The
Newsroom.” “The Morning
Show” lacks the theatrical
brio of those series, and also
the sense that television
might be a fun place to work,
between the tantrums,
breakdowns and passive-ag-
gressiveness. People in
Sorkin shows love their jobs;
people in “The Morning
Show” mostly love having
their jobs.
It’s more like a Manhat-tan “Game of Thrones,”
really, in which various forms
of subtle, even polite skul-
duggery, backstabbing and
under-bus-throwing are en-
acted and discussed, with a
lot of attention paid to power
and gender dynamics in the
workplace. Characters fight
to “control the narrative.” “I
just need to be able to control
the narrative so I’m not writ-
ten out of it,” says Alex, who
wants to keep her show.
“Controlling narrative is
more powerful than you can
imagine,” Mitch will say
many episodes later, as he
tries to turn things to his ad-
vantage. (There is not much
in the way of noble sacrifice.)
As a mix of melodrama
and well-written interactions
that feel genuinely human,
“The Morning Show” is fairly
entrancing. Its characters,
though big, are flawed in nor-
mal ways — “Nobody’s mo-
tives are 100% pure,” some-
one says. Seeming villains
will come to look more like
heroes, and what look like
moral choices might mask,
even to the chooser, a power
play. It skates along on ques-
tions of transparency and
hypocrisy, sticking to the
script or going rogue. There
are decisions that look like
accidents, and accidents
that look like decisions. All of
them, to be sure, arranged by
writers. The ending is almost
operatic; not quite believable
yet emotionally satisfying. It
killed me, I must confess.TELEVISION REVIEW
A Manhattan ‘Game of Thrones’
JENNIFERAniston and Steve Carell in Apple TV+’s new “The Morning Show,” which deals with power and gender dynamics at work.Hilary B. GayleApple‘The Morning
Show’
Where: Apple TV+
When: Anytime
Rating: TV-MA (may be
unsuitable for children
under the age of 17)‘Dickinson’
Where: Apple TV+
When:Anytime
Rated:TV-14 (may be
unsuitable for children
under the age of 14)[‘Dickinson,’from E1]
REESEWitherspoon, left, and Jennifer Aniston form
a reluctant partnership in “The Morning Show.”Apple TV+Workplace dramedy
‘The Morning Show’
is better than you’ve
heard, and timely too.
ROBERT LLOYD
TELEVISION CRITIC