There are lots of reasons to be grateful about being a woman in 2023, but watching Apple TV+’s new series Lessons in Chemistry, one dominated above all else: thank God I wasn’t trying to be a scientist in the 1950s.
Lessons in Chemistry (which has been adapted from the book of the same name) is at pains to show us all the ways in which a woman’s life was uniquely miserable in the sausage-fest field of science at the time: being told to “smile, love” (or the American equivalent thereof), not being recognised for eminent research, with one’s life’s work stolen by men on the basis that nobody would believe a woman could have come up with it anyway.
Fortunately, I was saved from punching a hole in my TV screen by Brie Larson, who plays our heroine Elizabeth Zott. Elizabeth is a nonconformist: she does not smile, love, she refuses to take part in her research lab’s beauty pageant and while she does like to cook, she does it in a sciencey way (with plenty of beakers and thermometers) which means it doesn’t count, so there.
She is also working as a lab technician despite a master’s degree in chemistry and being clearly smarter then literally every scientist she works with. That’s until she meets Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), who’s almost as odd as her. While she’s telling women that she doesn’t wear perfume because “in the lab, your sense of smell alerts you to potential dangers”, he’s asking women if there’s “benzaldehyde in your perfume?” before being promptly sick on them.
Naturally, they hit it off. The pair goes onto conduct some groundbreaking research into the true nature of DNA, fall madly in love and all seems rosy. That is, until various significant events lead to Elizabeth being fired and she is forced to accept a job as a host on a cooking programme for women. Whiplash much?
If that change of direction feels unusual, well this is a show with some undoubtedly off-the-wall moments. At the start of the third episode, we suddenly realise that Elizabeth’s rescue dog Six Thirty is not only sentient, but capable of conducting voiceovers to screen about his traumatic past and failure to protect the people he loves.
The show itself is gorgeous, shot in a kind of mild sepia that makes the dusty California landscape look beautiful. Larson is great as the prickly, unlikeable Elizabeth who you just can’t help rooting for. She draws the eye like a magnet – also hooray for the subplot featuring her neighbour Harriet Sloane (Aja Naomi King), who is battling to stop a freeway being built through their predominantly black neighbourhood.
But mix this all together and everything just feels a bit... bland. Elizabeth and Calvin’s story plays like a fairytale with predictable results. The villains are clearly sexist pigs who deserve their comeuppance and the goodies are unequivocally on the side of social justice and progress. This is the 1950s, very much through the lens of 2023.
Ultimately everything feels just a little bit too polished. That’s not a bad thing, but it won’t rock your world: it’s a tasty enough treat, but unlike Elizabeth’s cooking, it’s a little underdone.
