If you’re lucky, you’ll watch one TV show a year that changes you forever. Take my word for it: Netflix’s East of Eden is that show, whether or not you’ve read John Steinbeck’s seminal 1952 novel of the same name. By the end of the seven episodes, timshel—a Hebrew word that Steinbeck reinterpreted to mean “thou mayest” and arguably serves as the lifeblood of the story—is something you’ll want to tattoo on your psyche so that you may never forget your capacity for change.
If you consider East of Eden’s place in American literature, it’s almost shocking that something as sweeping as Netflix’s adaptation—which far surpasses the scope of the 1955 film (famous for being James Dean’s breakout vehicle) and towers above the well-regarded but little-seen 1981 miniseries—hadn’t existed until now. This East of Eden comes from creator Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the 1955 film. (Which was nominated for four Academy Awards but only covers the last third of the novel.) Her deep love of a story that clearly shaped her childhood imagination is clear, but she doesn’t let reverence get in the way. Her secret? Clearly it was casting four actors at the absolute zenith of their powers: Florence Pugh, Christopher Abbott, Mike Faist, and a breakout Hoon Lee.
A well-paired Abbott and Faist play Adam and Charles Trask, respectively, as quarrelling brothers who grow up as farmers on the East Coast. A mysterious young woman named Cathy (Pugh) shows up on their doorstep, bloodied, and eventually marries Adam. She gives birth to twins (later played as teenagers by Joseph Zada and Joe Anders), while Charles plays home-wrecker. Then Adam and Cathy move to the Salinas Valley in California, where they meet a friendly neighbour in Samuel Hamilton (a wizened Ciarán Hinds) and hire a servant, Lee (Lee).
Throughout most of the series, Kazan foregrounds Cathy, of whom Steinbeck wrote in the novel, “It doesn’t matter that Cathy was what I would have called a monster. Perhaps we can’t understand Cathy, but on the other hand we are capable of many things in all directions, of great virtues and great sins.” Thanks to career-best work from Pugh, Kazan brings us as close as we’ll ever come to understanding Cathy. Her performance is at different times violent, distant, and tragic, mostly in her scenes away from the claustrophobic Trask households. Abbott, meanwhile, is a perfect match: Often with just a few words or even a look, he unfurls a wounded man whose welts and bruises make it such that he’ll never understand her.
To fully explore every one of Kazan’s decisions in her adaptation—including the unfortunate but necessary decision to background the Hamilton family (save Samuel)—would spoil the lost-in-a-good-book feeling the series will give you. But it’s worth noting the turn-of-the-century costuming, which is masterful but never attention-grabbing, from the Trask family’s button-ups to the lace dresses at Cathy’s brothel. And though Kazan shot East of Eden in New Zealand, her framing of the Salinas Valley is like a classic landscape painting: amber, grass, dawn, dusk. It’s Steinbeck’s words come to life.
Most of East of Eden’s reviews, justifiably, praise Pugh’s powerhouse turn as Cathy as the show’s greatest coup. But it’d be an Adam and Eve–level sin to ignore that this adaptation simply would not punch this hard without Hoon Lee, a longtime theatre and TV player (most recently in Apple TV’s Your Friends and Neighbours) whom we should immediately consider one of our greatest working character actors. Steinbeck’s depiction of Lee is surprisingly modern, showing a man facing prejudice in mid-20th-century America, code-switching between cultures but daring to dream of the life he deserves. Hoon Lee runs with what’s in the text and deepens the man considerably, adding a fateful trip to San Francisco that’s much shorter in the novel. Lee’s performance is tender, heartbreaking, and radically optimistic, the human embodiment of timshel.
East of Eden, famously, is an Adam and Eve tale, wrestling with nature against nurture and whether we really, truly, can break the cycle we were born into. It’s not just biblical in the literal sense, but it’s a Bible for how to live a life. In a time when so many people, myself included, feel powerless against every damn thing we’ve faced these past few years, Kazan’s vision of timshel isn’t just revolutionary. Thou mayest. It’s a rallying cry. And it just might change your life.
