“Dickinson” showrunner Alena Smith has detailed the challenges of making the Apple TV+ period drama show starring Hailee Steinfeld as the queer female lead, playing poet Emily Dickinson. Apple kept her in the dark about the series’ success, Smith said, which made creating the series much more difficult.
The first season of the series arrived on the streamer in 2019, with the second on January 8, 2021. Season 3 concluded the arc Smith envisioned for the project and was released on November 5, 2021.
Describing what drives streaming services to pursue creative projects, Smith told Harper’s Magazine that streamers seek to increase their subscriber numbers by taking big creative initiatives that attract new audiences.
“It’s like a whole world of intellectuals and artists got a multibillion-dollar grant from the tech world,” Smith said. “But we were wrong and frankly convinced it was because they cared about art.”
Before it was known whether the series would have a second season, she was tasked with developing season 2 to spec.
“I was made to understand,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to start all over again and write a whole new season with no guarantee of a green light. So it was expected that I am taking this risk, while the entities that could most benefit from the success of my creative work, the platform and the studio, would not risk a cent.
It was also Smith’s responsibility to encourage everyone else involved in making the series to return for consecutive seasons. Two weeks after production began on Season 2, the series debuted as one of the streamer’s four original series to immediate acclaim.
“I was only allowed to do the show to the extent that I was willing to take incredible amounts of risk and work on my own body perpetually, endlessly, for years,” she said. “And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.”
Because the streamer didn’t want to share her viewership data with her, she decided to tell them she was done in 2020 after three seasons, and they accepted it.
Smith compared the “high barrier of entry” for his idea due to the show featuring Dickinson’s “difficult to understand” poetry, with the making of “I Love Dick,” a small press book by Chris Kraus which was adapted into a Prime Video series in 2016.
“It doesn’t happen because people use profit as a goal,” Smith said.
She described Apple’s guidelines on what they expected from the series as unclear, due to a “radical information asymmetry” when it came to management’s priorities and actions.
Requests from her and her colleagues for a timeline and premiere date for the series once production on the first season was completed were ignored, leading Smith to fear that the platform would destroy the series altogether . She did not receive a copy of the completed project, which existed on Apple’s servers and was their property.
