Besides “Room” (the drama that won her an Academy Award) and her turns as Captain Marvel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Brie Larson found the time to make an Apple TV series … and if you love period pieces, I can’t recommend this show highly enough.
Based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Bonnie Garmus, “Lessons in Chemistry” introduces audiences to Larson’s protagonist Elizabeth Zott, a woman stuck working as a low-level lab technician at the Hastings Research Institute in the 1950s — where none of the men will let her launch her own research project. (They claim that it’s not just because she’s a woman but because she doesn’t have a PhD. She quit her doctorate program, as we learn in flashbacks, when her advisor attempted to assault her. She stabbed him non-fatally with a pencil and refused to apologize.) When Elizabeth finds herself working with the brilliant and genuinely kind Dr. Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), he finally recognizes that she’s a scientific genius. But when Calvin is killed in a shocking accident, and Elizabeth realizes that she’s pregnant with his child, everything changes.
As a single mother raising her precocious daughter Madeline, played by Alice Halsey (her name is actually “Mad,” for the emotion Elizabeth feels upon her birth), Elizabeth struggles to make ends meet until, through bizarre circumstances, she ends up with her own cooking show called “Supper at Six,” which she’s determined to fill with scientific information because cooking is just … chemistry. Larson is absolutely perfect as Elizabeth, a taciturn woman with a bigger capacity for love than she truly realizes, and the supporting actors, which includes Aja Naomi King, Kevin Sussman, Rainn Wilson, B.J. Novak, and Rosemarie DeWitt, are also fantastic. So, is Garmus’ novel based on a true story? Not quite.
Lessons in Chemistry is based on a book, not a true story … but it pulls from women’s experiences
According to an interview that author Bonnie Garmus gave The Guardian in 2023, “Lessons in Chemistry” isn’t strictly based on a true story … but it was inspired by sexism she faced at work as a copywriter. In an incident she describes in the profile, Garmus was working at a firm when she gave a presentation and got no reaction, only for a man in the room to repeat what she said basically verbatim and earn everyone’s agreement. As Garmus tells it, she went back to her desk and knocked out the opening chapter of “Lessons in Chemistry.” (“I did it on their dime,” she joked.)
“All of my life I’ve encountered sexism, but that day I really felt like if I hadn’t been a woman, it wouldn’t have happened,” Garmus said of the experience. “I decided to write my own role model. What would she have done in that situation?” Enter Elizabeth Zott, portrayed so beautifully by Brie Larson … who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about taking on the role of this stern but wholly human woman in 2024.
“I think one of the great tasks of playing human beings is handling human issues with sensitivity and care so that we can look at them and talk about them and add to this growing conversation of support and care for others,” Larson said before revealing that she earned Garmus’ approval. “Once the show was done, Bonnie and I had dinner and she was like, ‘You are Elizabeth,’ ” Larson recalled. “I fell into a pile of goo, and it was like, OK, no one else has to understand it. You get it, so we’re good.”
Does the TV adaptation of Lessons in Chemistry differ dramatically from its source material?
Things change during the adaptation process all the time, so if you’ve read “Lessons in Chemistry” and haven’t watched the show yet, what changes? Without getting into too many spoilers, the character of Harriet Sloane changes drastically from page to screen. In Bonnie Garmus’ book, Harriet is a kindly older woman who watches Mad when Elizabeth is occupied; on the TV show, she’s a young Black lawyer (played by Aja Naomi King) who’s locked in a fierce fight to prevent a highway from being built in her predominantly diverse neighborhood. She does, like in the book, unexpectedly bond with her neighbor Elizabeth, but in the show, the two are more like sisters.
Speaking to Town & Country in 2023, showrunner Lee Eisenberg (“The Office,” “Jury Duty”) explained the shift in Harriet’s character. “This is a show about people on the margins. You’re looking at it through the prism of a white woman who is working and living in a patriarchal society and is using her wit and grit to move forward,” he noted, referencing the fact that the series is set in the 1950s. “What must it be like for a Black woman during that time?”
After stating that Harriet is the biggest change (which is objectively correct), Eisenberg also noted that he tweaked Calvin’s history. “He grew up in a boys’ home, that was something we took from the book, but his experiences at the home was something that wanted to connect it back to chemistry and science, and for both Elizabeth and Calvin showing the moment that they both kind of discover their life’s passion,” he explained. “Lessons in Chemistry” is streaming on Apple TV now, so discover those changes for yourself.
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