Television series

Dickinson

Name: Dickinson
Genre: Drama, Comedy, History
Released: 2019
Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Jane Krakowski, Adrian Enscoe, Anna Baryshnikov, Toby Huss

Dickinson takes Emily Dickinson's cloistered nineteenth-century life and blows it open with modern slang, pop needle-drops, and a Death who shows up looking suspiciously like Wiz Khalifa. It's a coming-of-age story about ambition, desire and the particular fury of being a genius nobody will publish. Funny, horny, occasionally devastating — a teen dramedy wearing a bonnet.

TVMaze rating

6.5

If you liked this

The Great2020

Elle Fanning's Catherine the Great gets the same treatment as Emily — real history filtered through anachronistic slang, wild tonal swings, and a genuine feminist rage underneath the jokes.

But The violence and crudity are far blunter and bloodier than anything Dickinson ever attempts.

Fleabag2016

Same trick of breaking the fourth wall to let a woman's interior chaos spill straight into the frame — very funny, then suddenly, quietly, not.

But Contemporary London instead of period trappings; if you came for bonnets, this won't scratch that itch.

Little Women2019

Greta Gerwig's adaptation shares Dickinson's exact preoccupation — a woman's art butting against family, money and marriage — but tells it with total sincerity.

But No jokes, no anachronism, no rap needle-drops; it plays everything straight and can feel comparatively staid.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

A Quiet Passion2016

Same woman, same century, same historical facts — but where Dickinson finds a screwball comedy, this finds a quiet horror story about a mind with nowhere to go.

Terence Davies's biopic tells the exact same life — same house, same sister, same withheld poems — but plays it as tragedy: still, formal, aching with repression.

But It's slow and airless by design; the anachronistic humour you loved is entirely, deliberately absent.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel2017

Another woman finding a voice nobody asked her to have, set in a different century's version of 'no one will ever book or publish you.'

But The gloss and glamour of 1950s New York couldn't be further from Dickinson's homestead confinement.

Anne with an E2017

A literary heroine, a repressive era, and a show unafraid to let a young woman's imagination visibly take over the screen and the plot.

But Gentler and more earnest — it wants you to cry, not to laugh at a personified bee.

Derry Girls2018

Different century, different continent, same electric teenage friction between enormous feelings and a world built much too small to hold them.

But No period setting at all — this is 1990s Northern Ireland, loud and profane rather than lyrical.

Bridgerton2020

If it's the corsets-plus-pop-music formula you're chasing, this delivers the same giddy anachronism, just with more sex and considerably less poetry.

But Thinner on ideas — it's romance first, and rarely interested in interrogating the century it dresses up.

Sex Education2019

Shares Dickinson's knack for using a heightened, slightly unreal setting to talk honestly about desire, shame and family dysfunction.

But Contemporary and explicit in a way that has nothing to do with nineteenth-century New England.

Harlots2017no page yet

A grubbier, angrier period piece about women elbowing for power and a voice in a world engineered to deny them both.

But Far bleaker and more explicit — the wit here is bitter, not warm and silly like Dickinson's.

Orlando1992

Both use deliberate anachronism and a fourth-wall-breaking narrator to argue that the constraints of 'your era' are far more porous than anyone admits.

Tilda Swinton plays a nobleman who lives four centuries and changes sex along the way, narrating straight to camera with the same wry, time-slipping cheek Dickinson uses.

But Denser and more art-house — Woolf's ideas about gender and history come first, plot a distant second.

Over the Garden Wall2014

Dickinson's Death rides around in a carriage; this show's entire world is a gentle, autumnal afterlife — both use fantasy to make dying feel oddly cozy rather than frightening.

A ten-episode animated fable about two brothers wandering a folkloric American underworld, shot through with the same hushed, melancholy fascination with death that gives Dickinson its strange sweetness.

But It's a children's miniseries — no romance, no Emily, just atmosphere, songs, and dread dressed up as whimsy.