This is not your grandfather’s “East of Eden” and that’s no joke.
The seven-hour adaptation of John Steinbeck’s epic novel that actress Zoe Kazan scripted and co-produced for Netflix is quite a departure from her grandpa Elia’s 1955 CinemaScope movie.
The series covers the whole, decades-long narrative, not just its final year during World War I. The younger Kazan treats her characters with humanistic sensitivity for the most part, eschewing the florid Method melodrama her elder favored.
I wouldn’t infer that Zoe intended to out-icon Elia’s use of James Dean here. But if she had, mission damn close to accomplished.
Pugh brings all she’s got to reluctant Salinas Valley farm wife Cathy turned Kate, the wickedest brothel madame west of the Sierras. You can’t take your eyes off the actress whatever dolled-up, beat-up or stone cold real condition the character is in.
Cathy is considered one of the great villains of American literature, and Pugh glories in every deceitful, manipulative, murderous impulse Steinbeck dreamed up and then some. But more compelling in Kazan’s intuitive interpretation, she’s a fierce and cunning fighter for her own agency. Schooled from early adolescence in the lustful ways of men, Cathy/Kate maintains moral rationalizations that, hypocritical as it may be for a weaponizing quick learner, puts viewers on her side far more often than good people ought to be.
Pugh does this to us with overt and subtle skills that complement Cathy’s sociopath-as-turn-of-the-century-sex-kitten bag of tricks. She rarely overemphasizes anything that’s not a physical act, and thereby relatably unveils the woman’s psyche.
The coolest contradiction the actress brings to the role is a core honesty that reveals Cathy’s real motives, no matter how sweet or pliant she pretends to be. Pugh can strike a marvelous, dazed stance when Cathy is honest with some lovestruck bastard who won’t believe her. Later moments of guilt-ridden dementia aren’t quite as effective — beautiful monsters are just more fun than handsomely aging ones — but Pugh’s full commitment to any business at hand is never to be questioned.
And she looks incredible in Kirsty Cameron’s late Victorian and Edwardian costumes. As well as out of them. The show’s plentiful carnal activities are graphic and quite kinkier than Steinbeck probably imagined, and way more than a 1950s filmmaker would have been permitted to.
Whether you find that excessive or not, it adds crucial spice to Zoe’s ambitious project. She wanted to tell the whole, 600-page doorstop of a book’s tale, and she does dutifully. Thrillingly too, whenever Pugh is onscreen.
Which is about half the time. The rest is a male weepy that can play like homework, often failing to sell the angst.
Mike Faist brings a little roiling danger to the role of Charles Trask, but he’s essentially written-out by Episode 3. As his sibling — and the main protagonist of this piece — Adam Trask, Christopher Abbott internalizes pain to the point of catatonia, so that when he does lash out it’s nothing like Raymond Massey’s holy terror of 1955.
Adam and Charles are the older generation of resentful Trask brothers here, and however dreary matters can get, it is rewarding to see how their conflicts and compromises filter down to the twins, Cal and Aron, that the movie focused on.
Of course, Dean played Adam’s less-loved son in the best-known adaptation of the painfully biblical allegory — then died, only to live forever. Let us be gentle, then, toward young Joseph Zada, who does his best to embody bad-seeded Cal beneath the martyred legend’s shadow. Richard Avalos was hardly as memorable as the movie’s Aron, but in 2026 the “good son’s” dissolution somehow seems more abrupt and superficial. Joe Anders, who plays him, was more affecting in Apple TV’s sleaze-a-thon expansion of “Cape Fear” earlier this year.
The series’ sole compelling masculine role benefits from a bit of Zoe’s flexibly feminism. Hoon Lee, who consistently registers the best performance on “Your Friends and Neighbors,” plays Lee. He’s the Chinese-American servant Steinbeck assigned to raise Cal and Aron after Cathy ran away soon after their birth. He performs both mom and dad duties while Adam mopes around for years, cooking and nurturing and handing down emotional wisdom as well as that from the vast number of books he’s read. Kazan rightfully expands his story while Lee the actor keeps the character real enough to, for the most part, move past Magical Asian cliches.
With an observant, calm voice, Lee recounts racist horrors and less macro aggressions that plagued his and his people’s lives. His angry outbursts are few but rattling, and while he lets the oblivious — or are they simply uninterested? — white guys know how much of his own ambitions he’s sacrificed for them, the man’s love for the boys and their exasperating father never really falters. It’s a tricky role that Lee navigates magnificently.
And, like Pugh’s, it’s a midcentury characterization of a twice-as-old archetype filtered through 2020s sensibilities. Done with a preference for naturalistic presentation, this feels like a valid way to update a key American generational saga.
Like some of its drama, the new production’s impeccably evoked era and settings can look a bit hemmed-in compared to the lavish, boom-or-bust California the movie created. TV budgets — and “East of Eden” clearly had a nice one — can’t account for the visual genius it takes to turn an ice house into a repository of furtive desire and bad business decisions, or make a stalled Ferris Wheel pregnant with wayward possibilities.
But things change, even as old patterns sort of repeat along with them. That’s always been what happens in “East of Eden” and in the nation it examines through one family’s fortunes and follies.
Zoe Kazan is of course aware of her talented, beloved grandpa’s besmirched reputation: Elia named names during the Communist witch hunts. She’s made her Steinbeck adaptation, while striving to do the novel full justice, her own stubborn thing.
It’s all rather typically, and more than a little admirably, American.
“East of Eden” is now streaming on Netflix.
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