Review: Brie Larson's 'Lessons in Chemistry' Gets So Much Right... and So Much, Not Quite

Brie Larson's eight-part miniseries on Apple TV+ is a triumphant, if not exactly believable, revisitation of mid-century America's scientific optimism and its sexist assumptions.

Larson plays Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in 1950s America – corporate America, that is; male colleagues overlook her degree, brush aside her insights, and ignore her talent except when they need a quick dose of her brilliance to ease them out of their own befuddlement or erase their mistakes.

Celebrated scientist Cal Evans (Lewis Pullman) works in the same lab, and when the two meet cute in a display of his intellectual arrogance and her dislike of him, anyone who's seen a rom/com knows where this is headed. Soon enough, the two are living together in Cal's house, which is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood – a neighborhood that's facing destruction due to construction of a new freeway that city planners have routed through communities like this one. In a motif of handy narrative devices that the show overuses, one of the residents, Harriet (Aja Naomi King), is a lawyer – she's also Cal's neighbor and friend, and her story becomes central to the show.

The battle over the freeway rages for the next decade, becoming background noise for the secrets about Elizabeth's and Cal's pasts that come to light in a steady drip. Not the most surprising of which is Elizabeth's rise to national fame as the host of a science-minded cooking show whose studio audience (along with viewers at home) are as rapt and busy with note-taking as students attending a popular college course.

But the show has more on its mind than gorgeous period production design and broad barbs aimed at institutional sexism and racist attitudes. Working from the novel Bonnie Garmus, creator Lee Eisenberg and fellow writers Emily Fox and Elissa Karasik mix a love story, a social justice drama, and a thriller about family secrets and come up with a formula that's often sweet and just as often perplexing.

Leaving aside the puzzling episode that's told from a dog's point of view (what were they thinking?), the series offers trite, often inexplicable developments that don't quite seem grounded in any real world. A classic villain (who bears more than a passing resemblance in looks and comportment to Ron DeSantis) casts a shadow over the early episodes; a snippy co-worker somehow gradually becomes an ally and a friend; figures of authority offer false assurances and hollow facades of trustworthiness before their essential rotten natures are exposed. It's all the stuff of drama, but it's also the stuff of melodrama when not correctly, shall we say, cooked up (a gay character's storyline feels gratuitous and shoehorned in, for example).

So, is the show terrible? Not at all. My heart loves "Lessons in Chemistry," in large part thanks to the, ahem, chemistry between Larson and Pullman. The pair have a vibe that communicates how the characters are the loves of each others' lives far more effectively than the often-clever dialogue. The problem comes with how the mind can't help but critique the show's erratic story sense.

There's no coincidence or stroke of fortune, good or bad, that the series won't drop in to see what kind of chemical reaction the story might undergo, and many of the characters – including a local preacher – turn out to have a bearing on the story that would be compelling only in true-life documentaries, but feel too far-fetched for fiction. This makes the series inventive as the writers work to blunt a sense of artificiality, but there's no escaping a stilted, and outmoded, sense of story. It's no coincidence that Cal's favorite author is Charles Dickens, whose novels were constructed along similar lines. But then, there's no such thing as coincidence in the plotting, which manages to twist all of its story ribbons into (mostly) satisfying, and too-neat, bows by the end.

The chemistry in other words, is formulaic, but it works; the flavors, however, tend toward the bland.

"Lessons in Chemistry" streams at Apple TV+.