Taking on "Lessons in Chemistry"

It's on a different streaming service and features entirely different creatives, but Apple's "Lessons in Chemistry" is clearly cut from the same cloth as "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix.  Here's another handsome mid-century limited series about a fictional brilliant woman making strides in an arena traditionally reserved for men.  Instead of chess, our heroine, Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) is a chemist who eventually finds a way to use her formidable skills to host a popular cooking show.  A quick note before we go further - foodies may enjoy some of the cooking scenes, but the cooking doesn't play nearly as big a role as the marketing would suggest.  

"Lessons in Chemistry" is more explicitly a show about feminism, and the world Elizabeth inhabits is much more hostile to her ambition.  In "The Queen's Gambit," the heroine was unlucky, but created a lot of her own problems.  In "Lessons in Chemistry," misogyny is the biggest block to Elizabeth's advancement from the beginning.  She starts out as a lab technician who wasn't able to complete her doctorate due to abusive faculty, so no one at her job will take her seriously.  Most of the men who should be her colleagues aren't above relying on her expertise, or sometimes outright stealing her work, but refuse to acknowledge her as an equal.  However, there are a few good eggs - namely the eccentric genius Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) who becomes Elizabeth's greatest defender.  

I like the way that the feminist themes are handled in "Lessons in Chemistry."  The point of Elizabeth's story often comes down to resilience rather than empowerment.  She has to learn to overcome failure and disappointment over and over again, and almost none of the injustices she suffers are ever fixed.  Few of the bad actors see bad consequences.  Instead, the show has several twists and turns as Elizabeth explores alternate paths to success, paths that take us to some unexpected places.  Elizabeth's story is also paralleled by others - her neighbor Harriet (Aja Naomi King) is a black woman trying to save the neighborhood from being destroyed by a highway project, and a young relative of Elizabeth's named Mad (Alice Halsey) tries to find information about her father, an orphan with a mysterious past.

Because the show is more didactic, "Lessons in Chemistry" is not as easy a watch as "The Queen's Gambit."  The characters are also less complex and the plot beats are more familiar.  Frankly, it got tiresome watching actors like Rainn Wilson and Andy Daly show up to scold Elizabeth for being unreasonable while twirling their metaphorical mustaches.  When the show is about more personal matters, it's more watchable.  Brie Larson's performance as Elizabeth Zott is very good, adroitly mixing familiar undersocialized nerd and "science girl" tropes with enough vulnerability to keep us on her side.  In a different kind of show, her self-righteousness and know-it-all attitude might come off as grating, but when her wins are so few and far between, she comes off as terribly brave instead.  And while Elizabeth talks like a dictionary, her feelings are very human, and she takes crushing defeats like anybody would.  She and Lewis Pullman's lovable Calvin have the best scenes together, making connections over scientific discourse, and navigating gender politics like explorers charting new territory.

Like all of Apple TV+'s prestige projects, "Lessons in Chemistry" has high production values and significant talent involved.  I'm especially glad to see Larson in a role making good use of her talents after a couple of rough projects.  Aja Naomi King is also a highlight, and I'm glad that the series kept Harriet in the spotlight for so much of the running time.  If this show gets a follow-up, it should definitely be focused on her political and/or legal career.  If there's anything that "Lessons in Chemistry" does better than "The Queen's Gambit," it's that it makes the narrative space to do better by its non-white characters.  I admire the ambition of the show's creators, even when the execution is iffy, and I'll keep an eye out for whatever they do next.

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