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The Chemistry Between Them: Thoughts on the Apple TV adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’ novel: Lessons in Chemistry

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(Warning: Contains spoilers)

Though I was aware of the frenzy around the publication of Bonnie Garmus’ breakout novel, and even bought a copy fairly early on, I was painfully slow in getting around to actually reading it. While that was time wasted that I could have spent fawning over what is now a firm favourite, it also allowed for an interesting perspective on the Apple TV adaptation of the book into an eight-part series. I finished reading it for the first time just as the pilot aired, binge-watched the series and, immediately afterwards, read the book again. This threw differences into sharp relief.

Let me start by saying I did not dislike the TV show, far from it. The casting was genius, particularly when it came to Brie Larsen as Elizabeth Zott, Alice Halsey as “Mad” Madeline Zott and Kevin Sussman as Walter Pine. It was visually gorgeous, just as funny and heartbreaking as the book and loyal to the major plot. However, there were a few key differences that I’m still scratching my head over.

The character who undertook the most notable changes was Harriet Sloane, the nosy but loving neighbour who becomes a member of the Zott family in her own right. Physically, the Harriet of TV land is not the Harriet of the book. The tired, overweight, white, middle-aged housewife has become a slim, young, beautiful black woman. This does act as a mechanism to bring race discrimination in 50s/60s America to stand alongside the gender discrimination that is a constant theme throughout, perhaps even adding to the complexity of it because, as mistreated as Elizabeth is, she would likely suffer much more if she had also been black.

While Harriet’s role in the plot as Elizabeth’s friend, confidant and babysitter is the same, her journey as an individual character is also very different on screen. Book Harriet is unhappily married to a deeply unpleasant man who barely seems to register her existence. Her big dream in life is to find real love, though a woman having an affair or requesting a divorce at that time would seem unthinkable. Happily, this is a dream she is able to fulfil and allow herself to be more than a bit player in either her husband’s or Elizabeth’s story. On the TV show she is married to a busy but loving man who, though still showing some caution characteristic of the age, is generally on board with the idea that she might be more than a wife and mother, that she might dare to be her own person and make her own mark on the world. Her opportunity comes when a developer wants to partially bulldoze their community to make way for a new road system, realistic enough for a booming America, and her battle to prevent it from happening. Her highs and lows in this battle and the obstacles she faces give her much more upfront contact with the audience than she has in the book and spotlights her own struggle to be heard in a male-dominated society.

Although these changes could arguably be seen as adding more depth and interest to her as a character and giving her more obvious relevance to the overall plot, I would argue that seeing it that way misses the point of her character. She is average, quietly unhappy, just a smidge overweight and unfulfilled and that’s okay, until she decides it isn’t and gets to work. She doesn’t need a minorly reluctant but overall supportive husband, or an external cause to fight for. Harriet is a cause to fight for.

Elizabeth, in an equal but opposite reaction, is instead made smaller to fit the screen. When we first meet her, she’s working for Hastings Research Institute as a sidelined lab tech as opposed to the sidelined but academically qualified character she is in the book. This is another interesting choice and one I find harder to reconcile. She has fought tooth and nail to achieve as much as she has already, despite attempted (and sometimes successful) derailment at every turn. She still has a long way to go, so why set her back even further with this on-screen demotion?

The Miss Hastings Pageant is another scene invented purely for the TV adaptation. She is bullied into participating by her peers, particularly Miss Frask who spins it as a favour Elizabeth would be doing Hastings and, by extension, science. She’s clearly reluctant, and I don’t want to speak for the author, but I personally believe book Zott would have flat refused to stand in front of her colleges half-dressed and parade her pretty face as if that’s what made her worthy of being in front of them. With as much content as the book provides, I don’t think the addition was really necessary.

Harriet is made bigger, Elizabeth smaller, but wasn’t the point all along - and wouldn’t Elizabeth Zott argue - that neither of them ever needed to be more or less than they already were. That everything we as women already are and wish to be is both enough and never too much?

Bonnie Garmus says in an interview that while she wasn’t absent from the adaptation process – she read scripts and offered her own insight – she trusted the team and with her background in copywriting knew how valuable client trust was when it came to doing a job. I also read a Guardian review of the show - interestingly, written by a woman – which celebrates both the “improvement” in Harriet’s character and the reduction of and tweaks to the character of Six-thirty the dog who, frankly, steals the show (and book) for me every time.

100 people can read the same book and take 100 different things away from it. TV must be similar, and my opinions are no more than that, but I’d be curious to know how other readers, particularly female ones, felt about the changes and how/why they were originally proposed. It may well be that I’m reading too deeply into it all, but isn’t that after all what good fiction calls for? Isn’t asking questions and applying independent thought, even at the risk of the conclusions being unpopular, exactly what Elizabeth Zott herself would call for?

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