Prepare yourself for more weird, wonderful anachronisms: Dickinson is getting a second season. The inventive comedy about the life of Emily Dickinson (Hailee Steinfeld) dropped its first season on AppleTV+ on November 1, but fans are already clamoring for more. Below, everything we know about the show’s second season, from casting news to when you’ll be able to binge.
When will it air?
No official premiere date for season 2 has been given, but Deadline reports that season 2 of the series is currently in production in New York. Back in October, before AppleTV+ had even launched, The Hollywood Reporter noted in a profile of the streaming service that Dickinson had been renewed for season two alongside originals including The Morning Show, See, and For All Mankind.
On November 7, Steinfeld confirmed news of the renewal, tweeting, “#DICKINSON Season 2 is underway…and has been for months 😉 x.”
Who’s in the cast?
ELLE.com has learned two new faces will be joining Emily, Austin (Adrian Enscoe), Sue (Ella Hunt), and Lavinia (Anna Baryshnikov) in season 2. Finn Jones (Game of Thrones, Iron Fist) will play Samuel Bowles, “an energetic and magnetic newspaper editor.” Meanwhile Pico Alexander (Catch-22, Home Again) will star as Henry “Ship” Shipley, an Amherst College dropout who rents a room at the Dickinsons’.
Returning cast members also include Jane Krakowski (Emily Norcross Dickinson) and Toby Huss (Edward Dickinson).
What will season 2 of Dickinson focus on?
After a first season that re-imagined Dickinson’s artistic ascension, creator Alena Smith revealed season 2 will explore the writer’s position on fame. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter she discussed how the series would dissect why much of the late poet’s work was written in secret and not published until after her death. “Season 1 gives one answer, which is it was a patriarchy and her father was opposed to women publishing. Season 2 is going to completely turn that on its head or inside out and give a very different answer, which is that Emily herself had a deeply ambivalent relationship to fame,” Smith explained. “Season 2 is really all about fame and the attention economy, which was a central concern in Emily Dickinson’s poems. She wrote many, many poems about fame and about running from fame or rejecting fame. But she definitely had an obsession about fame even if she was subverting it.”
The showrunner also tweeted a tease of things to come, writing, “Dickinson really is as much a dramatic adaptation of her poetry as it is a historical depiction of her biography. This will become even more clear in season two.”
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Will there be a third installment?
While there is no official word on season 3, Smith told THR that season two doesn’t take the show into the Civil War, a time period she’s hoping to explore. “We get a bit closer to the Civil War [in season two]. We get right up to the brink of it,” she said. “The season kind of builds up to the event of Harpers Ferry, of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, which we are kind of figuring in our show as kind of a 9/11 moment or a moment when war becomes inevitable and the society that has held itself together so far knows that it’s not going to work anymore. If and when we have a season three, that would be when we were in a Civil War.”