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Early this month before the confusion of the CDC’s notice that masks are no longer necessary (or are they?), COVID and its devastating intrusions into life and television productions was top of mind for the six storytellers gathered remotely, some from as far away as Amsterdam, for The Envelope’s annual Showrunner Roundtable.
“It’s really strange now to think of a new television show or a movie, you can’t avoid COVID. Otherwise, you’re moving in the past, or the future. I mean, it’s just what you’re going to go through. It has to be part of the narrative,” said Steve McQueen during the May 2 chat. “When I see someone even going for a handshake I’m like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute.’ The level of anxiety just hits the roof,” the director of Amazon Prime’s five-film anthology “Small Axe” added.
When Emily Dickinson died, nearly two thousand poems were found sewn in booklets called fascicles, written out as fair copies. These manuscripts were done; there were no mistakes or corrections. But also, many poems included a little plus-sign at the end of a word, or line, or whole stanza, and at the bottom of the page, she offered another word, or line, or stanza to read in its place.
Similarly, many of us have our own variations on Emily Dickinson. Just over one year ago (“Since then ‘tis Centuries and yet/Feels shorter than the Day”), the first season of Dickinson dropped. Dickinson’s creator and showrunner, Alena Smith, offered us her Emily Dickinson funny, sexy, angry, desperate, secure, beloved, loving and while it joined other recent adaptations of Dickinson on film, this variant also felt new.