It’s the Past Year’s Biggest Debut Novel. The TV Adaptation May Be Even Better.

Set in Southern California in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Apple TV+’s adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ bestselling novel, Lessons in Chemistry, smacks its lips over the vintage, candy-colored autos and appliances of the period while baring its teeth at the era’s bigotry. This familiar ambivalence—a less sophisticated version than Mad Men’s, but of the same ilk—alternates between tempting and repelling an audience who relishes the way the past looked while judging its unenlightened attitudes. Oh, those nipped-waist frocks and Danish modern sofas! Oh, those piggish bosses and husbands!

The TV series transforms a fairy tale beloved of predominantly female book groups into another kind of fairy tale, aimed at pleasing a broader swath of viewers. Created by Jury Duty showrunner Lee Eisenberg and starring Brie Larson as the chemist Elizabeth Zott, the screen adaptation is obviously the result of some predictable, strategic decisionmaking. Garmus might have gotten away with setting her novel of rampant midcentury chauvinism in a world that’s entirely white, but no TV series in 2023 can expect to do the same. The changes made to the novel are the sort of thing regressive fans (if Lessons has any) like to gripe about online, but thanks to solid scripts and a handful of sensitive performances, the series ends up richer and more thoughtful than the book.

Garmus’ novel—a surprise hit for the now-66-year-old debut author—runs on the energy generated by its villains. They are straight white men in positions of power, the smirking, mediocre bigots who run the worlds of science, entertainment, and industry, and you long to see them taken down. Elizabeth—whose bid for a Ph.D. was thwarted by a particularly horrific instance of sexism—battles not just to be taken seriously but to work in her chosen field at all. Financial pressures force her to take a job as the host of a daytime TV cooking show, in which she soberly explains the chemical processes behind searing, baking, and braising. The station head hates this. He wants her to wear tight dresses and end every show by mixing a cocktail for her fictional husband. But a sizable audience of women adores Elizabeth, who takes their work in the kitchen seriously and treats them like adults.

In the novel, Elizabeth has a neighbor, Harriet Sloane, a lonely, middle-aged empty nester with a brute of a husband. In the series, Harriet (Aja Naomi King) is younger, Black, the mother of two small children, and the wife of a physician serving overseas in the Korean War. TV’s Harriet, too, has sidelined her professional dreams. She once planned to become a lawyer, and channels her ambition and formidable rhetorical skills into activism. She leads an organization opposing the bisecting of Los Angeles’ Sugar Hill neighborhood, where she and Elizabeth live, by a new freeway. (This subplot is based on the real-life history of Sugar Hill, once home to the city’s Black elite.) Like the Harriet of the novel, the series’ Harriet provides Elizabeth with some desperately needed advice and support after Elizabeth ends up raising her daughter, Madeline (Alice Halsey), alone. But unlike the novel’s Harriet, she has fully developed concerns and a life of her own.

Elizabeth meets Madeline’s father, Calvin (Lewis Pullman), at the beginning of the story, at the research lab where they both work. Within weeks, the pair have moved in together, across the street from Harriet. A brilliant and celebrated chemist and the lab’s star, Calvin can’t understand why the equally brilliant Elizabeth hasn’t risen as high. She has to explain to him “sex discrimination,” something he’s never thought about before and finds baffling: “Why wouldn’t we want women in science? That makes no sense. We need all the scientists we can get.” The series deftly extends this obliviousness to Harriet’s cause. Calvin, who genuinely cares for Harriet and her kids, cannot see why it’s especially important to her that he, a white man, appear at a public forum to speak out against the freeway. In the throes of an exciting development in his research, he forgets to show.

Eisenberg departs from Garmus’ novel in manifold ways to accommodate the changes to Harriet’s subplot. Instead of blasting Frank Sinatra while he works, Calvin listens to jazz. He and Harriet bond over their shared love of the saxophonist Charlie Parker. Elizabeth doesn’t get it; the music is too disorderly for her. Part of the novel’s humor comes from Elizabeth’s stubborn rationalism and literal-mindedness. When a colleague suggests that she learn to “outsmart” the system at work, she retorts that systems should just be “smart in the first place.” In particular, Elizabeth’s stubborn reluctance to lie strategically about the processed foods manufactured by her TV show’s sponsor causes conniption fits among the station’s management. In making Calvin a jazz buff, the series suggests that for all their shared love of the scientific method, he has a knack for improvisation that Elizabeth lacks.

Elizabeth’s rigidity is both a comic engine for Garmus’ novel and its weak spot. The character doesn’t change much in the course of the story; the whole point of the book, after all, is that the world ought to be able to accommodate a woman of her gifts and oddities. Men should stop telling her to smile or expecting her to organize her life around her family instead of her work. But Lessons in Chemistry, novel and series, is a sentimental story—the book contains lengthy passages told from the point of view of Elizabeth’s loyal dog, for crying out loud, an element adored by readers but one that the series wisely chooses to downplay. The tone of both novel and series builds the expectation that Elizabeth’s story will end on a heartwarming communal note, not a shot of a woman working alone in a lab, which would be Elizabeth’s idea of heaven.

Here’s the conundrum: For Elizabeth to grow over the course of Lessons in Chemistry, she has to become a different woman than she is at the start, but the premise of both novel and series is that it’s unfair to expect her to do so. Larson does a credible job of playing a character fundamentally at odds with her own story, but it’s the supporting actors—especially King and Pullman, their faces conveying a flickering, complicated vulnerability—who give the series its most moving scenes. Eisenberg resolves the paradoxes inherent in Lessons in Chemistry by having Elizabeth make a rather abstract speech to her viewers about the importance of embracing “change.” She warms up, becomes an honorary member of Harriet’s extended family. She makes jokes on the air. She smiles more. With the exception of the skintight dress, these changes are unsettlingly similar to the ones demanded of her by boorish men.

Maybe we haven’t come as far from 1960s America as we’d like to think? Or, rather, we cannot shake that cozy, sunny fantasy of 1950s domestic life, even though we know full well what lurked behind the facade. (The series’ sets often remind me of “cottagecore” vibe videos posted by zoomers on TikTok.) The world remains a difficult place for women like Elizabeth Zott, women whose idea of a happy ending seems beyond the ken of Lessons in Chemistry. Not that they’ll be watching; most of them probably think they have better things to do.