Alena Smith, showrunner of Apple TV+’s “Dickinson” says she ended the show after season three after Apple “actively gaslit her.”
In a report at The Wrap, showrunner she detailed the challenges of making the Apple TV+ period drama show starring Hailee Steinfeld as its queer female lead, playing poet Emily Dickinson. Apple kept her in the dark about the show’s success, Smith said, which made creating the show significantly more difficult.
The first season of the series arrived on the streamer in 2019, the second one on Jan. 8, 2021. Season 3 concluded the arc Smith envisioned for the project and came out Nov. 5, 2021. Smith says that, before she knew whether the show would get a second season, she was asked to develop session two on spec.
“It was communicated to me,” Smith said, “that my only choice to keep the show alive was to begin all over again and write a whole new season without a green-light guarantee. So I was expected to take on that risk, when the entities that stood to profit the most from the success of my creative labor, the platform and studio, would not risk a dime. “….I was only allowed to make the show to the extent that I was willing to take on unbelievable amounts of risk and labor on my own body perpetually, without ceasing, for years,” she said. “And I knew that if I ever stopped, the show would die.”
Because the streamer wouldn’t share viewership data with her, Smith decided to tell them she was done in 2020 after three seasons, and they accepted it.
What’s more, in 2023, she penned a cautionary memo exclusively for The Ankler about how the mega-companies who currently produce, own, and distribute TV shows and movies are creating monopolies that, without regulation, will send Hollywood into a death spiral.
She said Netflix’s new model of overpaying everyone up front in order to exclusively control the back end and keep any quantifiable audience response hidden, globally, forever, bamboozled the old guard of legacy media and artists. And once Netflix made this model the new normal, other companies followed suit.
“My show, ‘Dickinson,’ was one of just four series to launch Apple’s global streaming service in 2019, and to this day I have no earthly clue how many people have seen it, nor what value my near-decade of creative labor generated for the company,” Smith said. “Not only do I have no metrics for my own success, I don’t even know how Apple would determine those metrics in the first place.”
She asserted that the monopolistic streaming system, as it turns out, works for nobody in Hollywood — not the execs, not the shareholders, and not the audience. Even the most successful creators of TV and film are screwed in this arrangement. Smith offered a resolution, calling for a political coalition to break up the studio-streamers.
“We need structural separation to better distinguish and disintegrate the internally-conflicted businesses of production and distribution. We need to make the entertainment industry genuinely competitive again, and stop this one-way slide towards monopoly and monopsony,” she said. “And we need this now, while there is still an industry of highly-skilled craftspeople to save.”
The first three seasons of “Dickinson” are streaming on Apple TV+.
About Apple TV+
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Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today
