Something to watch tonight: Thursday 11 January

Lessons in Chemistry (Eisenberg, 2023)

When I star­ted this news­let­ter all those months ago I thought I would be recom­mend­ing more tele­vi­sion than I have been. After all, we watch enough of it.

But this news­let­ter comes out every week­day and tele­vi­sion series are l o n g.

I could do what a num­ber of my col­leagues do, which is review a show based on advanced access to the first three epis­odes. That’s fair enough, we’ve all got to eat, but my (up to now) unspoken man­tra for Funerals & Snakes is “It’s bet­ter to be right than to be first” and I find it really hard to recom­mend some­thing until I know how it ends.

Because end­ings are important.

Lessons in Chemistry is a case in point. If I had come to you with a recom­mend­a­tion after the first three epis­odes, I would be describ­ing a dif­fer­ent show to the one con­tain­ing all eight. (We also waited until all the epis­odes were binge-able rather than watch­ing weekly when it dropped back in October and November, and smashed it out over three nights.)

Based on a phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful debut nov­el by Bonnie Garmus, Lessons is the story of a young chem­ist in 1950s California who is determ­ined to over­come the pat­ri­arch­al obstacles that are strewn across her path but who finds that her solu­tions are a sur­prise even to her.

Brie Larsen (also an exec­ut­ive pro­du­cer) plays Elizabeth Zott, a gif­ted research­er who was unable to com­plete her PhD for plot reas­ons and who is now a humble lab tech­ni­cian watch­ing con­sid­er­ably less able male chem­ists fumble around mostly cluelessly.

Over the fol­low­ing ten years or so, we see her fall in love, exper­i­ence ter­rible loss, have a child she thought she nev­er wanted, and begin a career as a proto-feminist day­time TV cook­ing show host.

It’s a shiny, fantasy 50s, with a ground­ing in real life but not much more grit than that, but the word “sat­is­fy­ing” could have been inven­ted to describe it. Lessons is excel­lent, taste­ful TV drama with well-conceived char­ac­ters and a nicely spun story and a mys­tery at its core.

If I had writ­ten about it after epis­ode three or so, I would have said that it relies a lot on the kind of nar­rat­ive coin­cid­ences that you can (per­haps) get away with more eas­ily in a nov­el. By epis­ode eight, I real­ised that those coin­cid­ences weren’t flaws, they were the theme of the show.

(I shouldn’t say “real­ised” as if I had some great per­son­al insight. It’s not a mys­tery – the show pretty much comes right out and says it.)

Where to watch Lessons in Chemistry

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Worldwide: Streaming on AppleTV+