REVIEW: Lessons in Chemistry Has All the Right Ingredients, But Not the Right Recipe

Based on the best-selling novel by Bonnie Garmus, AppleTV+’s Lessons in Chemistry focuses on Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson), a female scientist attempting to make it in a man’s world in the 1960s. The show opens with Zott working as a low-level chemist at a research facility. It is here where she meets Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), a famous scientist who is renowned in the science world. From there, we watch as Zott falls in love, battles of gender discrimination, hosts her own extremely successful cooking show, Supper at Six, and attempt to navigate what it means to be a woman in the 1960s. This may seem like a lot of topics to cover in only eight-episode series, and you’re right, it is way too many.

The series spend much of its time jumping from topic to topic, leaving me a tad bit confused as to what story the writing staff was trying to tell. Instead of focusing the story on how a woman carves a path for herself in a time where women were expected to keep their mouths shut, the story gets muddled by a number of outlandish things, i.e., the self-narrating dog. It was these moments that quickly caused me to lose interest in the series. Now, if you are someone who has read the book, I am sure you will be expecting these out there moments. They most likely are fully developed moments that add to the story as you read the book, and you will have no problem filling in the blanks when they happen on screen, but as someone who has never read the book, these moments seemed too out of this world for me.

Larson steps in as our lead Zott and creates a very unlikeable character. I’m not sure if it was because of how Larson chose to portray the character, or if she is like this in the book, but she came off extremely rigid and stiff. Even in the scenes with Pulman, Larson came off very standoffish leading to very little chemistry between the two, which is a shame because Pulman was a shining moment for this series. He was a clear standout for me in this series. The other standout for me was Aja Naomi King as Evans’ next door neighbor Harriet Stone. A community activist and a woman’s that not afraid to speak her mind, she is who the series should have centered around. King easily captivated the character, while at the same time keeping the audience engaged in her storyline. She stole every scene she was in.

Lessons in Chemistry has all the right ingredients to be an award worthy series, but the ingredients unfortunately never come together. This is a series I would highly recommend passing on. Instead, I recommend giving the book a read, or another. That may be a better way to spend your time.

Grade: C-