Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Lessons In Chemistry’ on Apple TV+, A Period Drama About Science, Sexism, Cooking, and Falling in Love

In the Apple TV+ adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’s best-selling book Lessons In Chemistry, Brie Larson stars as a brilliant chemist who has long been underestimated simply because she’s a woman living in America in the 1950s. After forming a relationship, both professional and romantic, with an equally brilliant scientist played by Lewis Pullman, her work leads her to become a wildly successful cooking show host who becomes an inspirations to the housewives who watch her.

LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The parking lot outside a TV studio is buzzing with women. It’s the late 1950s, and these women are hoping to get a seat in the studio audience of a popular cooking show hosted by Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson). A small mob forms around Zott when she exits her car and enters the studio, leaving behind a wake of adoring fans.

The Gist: Lessons in Chemistry opens by showing us where Elizabeth Zott is now: the host of a massively successful cooking show Supper at Six, beloved by women everywhere. In this show-within-a-show, Zott speaks to her audience with no nonsense, no flowery condescension. She’s a scientist first, and she treats every woman watching as if they, too, are scientists, because that’s exactly what they are when they’re cooking. She discusses ingredients and temperatures as variables that will affect the results of food experiments, but when executed properly, these meals are not just triumphs of science, but labors of love meant to nourish the family.

Zott’s authority on science comes from having received her master’s degree in chemistry from UCLA, and we flash back to her life seven years earlier, working at Hastings Labs as a lab technician obsessed with her work, who speaks with a near-clinical tone and whose sole extracurricular is cooking. She’s the only woman at the company who is not a secretary, though that doesn’t stop everyone from treating her like one. A typical day for her features the men in her lab asking her to make them coffee, and when she reminds them she’s one of their peers, they respond with some version of “Sure you are, sweetheart, now don’t forget the cream and sugar.”

Worse still, she is forced to enter the “Little Miss Hastings” pageant, a beauty contest in which all the male scientists judge the women at their workplace. Despite her protests, Zott is told by her boss that she needs to enter or else she’ll risk losing her job. Still, she can’t stomach the indignity of it all (she is neither interested in being judged on her looks, nor interested in befriending the gossipy secretaries who enjoy this kind of pageantry) so in the middle of the event, she walks out. As she’s leaving, she runs into one of the lab’s most privileged and revered scientists, Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), whose work has earned him a prestigious grant that helps keep Hastings afloat. Evans is reclusive and weird: he jogs to work (jogging literally doesn’t even exist at this point in history!), he’s allergic to everything, and his colleagues don’t really like him. And up till this point, Evans has treated Zott like everyone else does, underestimating her because she’s a woman.

They’re both attempting a hasty escape from the pageant: she’s fleeing before it’s her turn in the talent portion of the event, and he’s barfing due to an allergy. He literally barfs all over the floor right in front of her, and she, realizing his vulnerability in this moment (and the fact that he has no car), offers to drive him home. It’s at this point these two brilliant minds who have been all but relegated to the fringes of their company, realize they’re more alike than they knew. This interaction sets off a series of events, including daily lunches together where she cooks for him including one such meal where she feeds him the lasagna recipe she has tried to perfect over 70 times. During this time, she reveals to him the research she’s working on in her down time, he offers her a role as his lab tech so she will have access to his resources and also not have to work in a lab filled with misogynist idiots.

Working together has its challenges: Elizabeth’s brain functions as if it’s a room in Marie Kondo’s home: minimalist, a place for everything, and everything in it’s place. Evans’ mind, on the other hand, is be-boppin’ and scattin’, nothin’ but jazz up in there. (There is a moment in the show where he plays a jazz record while they work, and she is basically traumatized by the aural chaos. It’s not a subtle metaphor for who they are as people, but it’s still effective enough!) While Evans’ self-imposed isolation and attempts to steer clear of other people at work seems both like personal preference and due to the fact that he has allergies that cause him to have intense physical reactions, Elizabeth isolates herself in part due to a past trauma, an assault that she experienced which is alluded to in flashbacks.

As these two loners form a bond with one another, we know from seeing Zott’s future self that once they unite, something about their partnership allows at least Elizabeth to flourish into this new role as chef, but it will be years in the making.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Lessons In Chemistry has nothing to do with comedy, but you can’t help but compare it to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Queen’s Gambit, two other shows that depict a similar time period and a woman trying to make it in a man’s business and being routinely iced out.

Our Take: There’s a lot to love about what Lessons In Chemistry is doing. Brie Larson and Lewis Pullman are great together (insert chemistry joke), the period sets and aesthetics are wonderful, and the story of Zott’s struggle and eventual success is compelling. We take for granted that women scientists are common these days (though there’s no doubt they still face hurdles that male scientists likely do not encounter), but the show never lets us forget that Elizabeth is an outsider because she’s a woman and she has had no choice but to build a wall around her.

We are reminded at every turn that Elizabeth is unequal, from the treatment she experiences from her colleagues to her being forced to perform femininity in the pageant, but more than that, she literally has to explain sexism to Evans, who has never heard of it. (Evans’ character is meant to be brilliant but socially inept, which is why Zott has to inform him that sexual discrimination is a real thing, but the conversation she has with him also serves as a subtle reminder to the audience that things in the ’50s were not as they are now: sexism, especially in the workplace, was hardly a blip on most men’s radar at that time.)

Though the early episodes of the show focus on the budding relationship between Zott and Evans, this is Brie Larson’s show. Elizabeth Zott is the star and this is her journey, and from the first episode, we are shown both ends of the spectrum she’s been on – first ignored by her colleagues, later besieged by fans – she’s an unlikely underdog, initially cold and unknowable, but as we come to understand her, we can’t help but root for her on her journey.

Sex and Skin: We see a decent amount of Lewis Pullman’s body as he showers in a non-sexual, just-rinsing-his-sweat-off-at-the-chemical-eyewash-station kind of way because he jogs to work every day.

Parting Shot: We cut back to Supper at Six, which is being broadcast live. Zott had been preparing her signature lasagna, and in the process of baking it, it burned. “That was not the intended outcome,” she tells her audience, her voice shaky. “Sometimes you can’t count on a formula. Sometimes you can’t control each variable. Sometimes, many times, things just turn out messy. Sometimes you will burn the lasagna,” she says.

“I guess it’s leftovers tonight,” she tells her audience. “Children, set the table, your mother needs a moment to herself,” she says as she walks off set and the feed cuts out.

Performance Worth Watching: Brie Larson is the heart and soul of the series, and while her co-stars Pullman and Aja Naomi King (as Evans’ neighbor Harriet) hold their own in their roles, in her hands Zott’s stiffness is tempered by softness and she brings a warmth to a role that could feel too cold in someone else’s hands.

Memorable Dialogue: “I don’t understand. Why would anyone discriminate based on something as intellectually nondeterminative as gender?” Calvin asks Elizabeth when she explains why she’s not taken seriously as a scientist. Brilliant though he may be, Calvin’s only constant variable in life has been cis-het-white maleness, so this throws him for a loop. Through a 2023 lens, this line feels like a winky, sarcastic joke, but here Calvin is earnestly trying to understand Elizabeth’s plight despite never having experienced injustice of any kind.

Our Call: STREAM IT! Much like the lasagna recipe that Zott keeps trying to perfect throughout the first episode, Lessons In Chemistry contains layers of ingredients that build on and play off of each other: romance, drama, history, the second wave of feminism, all snuggled neatly into a 13 x 9 pan. When combined, they’re all greater than the sum of their parts.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.