Emily Norcross Dickinson

Mrs. Dickinson presides over the family household in Amherst with a fixation on order, etiquette, and the proper running of a respectable home. Anxious about appearances and her daughters' marriage prospects, she frets over table settings and social calls, treating domestic perfection as both duty and refuge from a world she can't otherwise control.

Jane Krakowski plays her at a delicious comic pitch, all wounded gentility and passive-aggressive sighing, in a show that delights in colliding period manners with modern sensibility. The writing could have made her a punchline alone, but Krakowski finds real anxiety underneath the fussing, a woman clinging to the only power etiquette allows her.