Charming performances and strong production values struggle to push through overwritten dialogue and ham-fisted plotting in Apple TV+’s mini-series “Lessons in Chemistry,” based on the hit 2022 novel by Bonnie Garmus. At its core, this is a story about how it is not predictable formulas that make up the building blocks of life but the chaotic random elements that define our journey. Trying to cram an overstuffed debut novel (and adding a bit more stuffing even) into eight episodes leads to a mini-series that often tells much more than it shows, allowing characters to become thematic and cultural mouthpieces more often than it should. However, engaging turns from Brie Larson and career-best work from Lewis Pullman help keep this from completely exploding in the high-budget TV test tube of Apple TV+.
The Oscar-winning star of “Captain Marvel” plays a different kind of superhero here, a female chemist forced to first face off against the rampant sexism of the world of science and then to push back against gender-based expectations in the world of television. Written by show developer Lee Eisenberg (“The Office”), the premiere has all the subtlety of a hammer to the face as fellow chemists tell Larson’s Elizabeth Zott to smile more and she’s pushed to join a beauty pageant with the secretaries at the facility. However, it’s almost like the writers get all of this out of the way early, and “Lessons in Chemistry” develops into something more subtle after defining the impediments to Zott’s progress so bluntly (before sliding back again into obvious dialogue.)
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The show becomes its best version of itself when Elizabeth meets another eccentric chemist named Calvin Evans (Pullman), who is, in many ways, her polar opposite. He likes to listen to loud music as they work and embraces the chaos while she demands order. Both can be conducive to scientific exploration. “What if life is necessarily unpredictable,” he asks, and, of course, the plotting then leans into the obvious answer to this question by throwing Elizabeth and Calvin for a loop. Before you know it, someone else has taken credit for her biogenesis research, and she’s a single mother. When the third episode is narrated by Elizabeth and Calvin’s dog (a guest piece of vocal work by B.J. Novak), it becomes clear that “Lessons” works best when it’s comfortable with the unexpected, revealing how adjusting is as important as planning.
Sadly, it doesn’t last for the full run of the series. Those easy choices from the premiere resurface, and the writing can get weighed down by the relatively soapy underpinnings of the source. It’s a story of sexism, trauma, racism, homophobia, and intense grief. That’s a lot for eight episodes of one show and it sags when it feels like it’s giving lip service to too many ideas. Episode six is the best example of this, a chapter that wants to interrogate the privilege of Elizabeth and even Calvin but it does so in capital letters and bold print. There’s material here involving Elizabeth’s Black neighbor Harriet (Aja Naomi King) that wasn’t in the book, and you don’t need to have read it to tell. It’s clearly crammed in as an attempt to add more social purpose to a show that already had a lot of it. It’s admirable on paper to interrogate Elizabeth’s privilege, but it ends up detracting from what works about the show in the first place—it’s a story about the unpredictability of life and racial injustice is sadly pretty predictable.
After tragedy and malfeasance from her superiors, Elizabeth ends up almost stumbling into hosting a live cooking show called “Supper at Six,” which gives her the perfect balance between the chemistry of creating the perfect dinner and asserting herself as a mother and woman. The show becomes a hit because she does something that the male producers of cooking shows never seemed to do before: Takes it and the role of the cooking mother seriously. She doesn’t talk down to people, especially not working mothers like herself, and that makes her special. Larson deftly captures the arc of a woman who often hides her emotion under a deadpan affect, allowing the emotional breakthroughs to have more impact. It’s a very good performance, and the ensemble is filled with welcome familiar faces like Thomas Mann, Beau Bridges, and a truly charming turn from Kevin Sussman (Stuart from “The Big Bang Theory”). The strong production values are also worth noting too, especially a lovely score from Carlos Rafael Rivera.
“It’s only when you look backward that you see how everything was connected,” states a character explicitly in the final episode, and it’s a line that both captures what works and what can be frustrating about “Lessons in Chemistry” at the same time. Everything that clicks about this story comes from when it embraces that unpredictability and unexpected connections, all the way down to choices made by Larson, Pullman, and others as actors that defy the melodramatic underpinnings of the source. However, for a show about a woman who trusted her viewers, this one often doesn’t give its watchers the same treatment, spelling out what we already know is in the formula. [C+]