Authors use words to paint a scene on the page; filmmakers use lighting and costumes and color to create cinematic moments. Two beloved books will soon come to television: Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Doubleday, $29) is the basis for an eight-part series for Apple TV+, directed by Sarah Adina Smith. The first two episodes premiere October 13, and the rest drop through November 24. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr (Scribner, paperback $18.99), forms the foundation of a four-part Netflix limited series, directed by Shawn Levy, premiering November 2.
The opening episode of Lessons in Chemistry starts as the book does, in the sense that it reveals Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) as the star of the TV series Supper at Six. But television affords viewers the chance to fully take in Zott's glamour as she steps out of her car at the studio to greet her line of fans, dressed in an unmistakable early-1960s palette of olive greens, creamy yellows, powder blues, and rosy reds. Next, we travel back seven years, to when Zott was intent and masterful in her work at a chemistry lab, but where her beauty and gender overpowered her intelligence in the perception of her coworkers. Everyone but Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), that is, who recognizes her brilliance and invites her to be his lab partner, as a peer.
Larson does a stunning job of conveying Zott's tunnel vision when it comes to her desire to figure out a scientific puzzle, with no care for others' view of her or how her filterless comments might come across. Her insistence upon an open door in the lab room foreshadows a traumatic episode that cost her a masters degree because she refused to "apologize" to the adviser who sexually assaulted her (revealed at the start of Episode 2). Madeline (played perfectly by Alice Halsey), the product of Zott's and Evans's other partnership, starts off Garmus's novel; in Lee Eisenberg's teleplay, viewers don't learn of Zott's pregnancy until the third episode. But, oh, the onscreen rapport Mad and Zott develop! It makes one imagine how different Zott's life might have been if her parents had supported her the way Zott encourages and challenges and loves Mad. The chemistry between Larson and Halsey is heaven, and the twist that reveals Mad's identity to viewers adds layers to later plot developments.
Another smart move casts Aja Naomi King as Zott's neighbor Harriet Sloane. In Eisenberg's version, Sloane, like Zott, has had her career thwarted: Sloane dropped out of law school when she became pregnant so her husband could continue his medical residency. But she puts her talent and intelligence to work leading the charge to protest plans to run a freeway through their predominantly Black neighborhood in Commons, Calif., just outside Los Angeles. The way that first Evans, then Zott, connect with the Sloane family develops organically and credibly--not without missteps--and King's performance is a standout, especially as she navigates her husband's return from serving with the medical corps in Korea.
While the Korean War is a specter in the background of Lessons in Chemistry, World War II envelops All the Light We Cannot See. A background of shadows and darkness, muted browns, and midnight blues shrouds Marie-Laur LeBlanc as she reads in Braille 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea over the radio. With barely enough illumination for viewers to see her face, we get a hint of what it must be like for Marie-Laur, blind from age six. Director Levy cast his net wide in searching for someone with the lived experience to play Marie-Laur, and his extraordinary discovery was Aria Mia Loberti, a Fulbright scholar, academic, and advocate for the blind, making her debut as an actress in this series.
Steven Knight, who adapted the teleplay from Doerr's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, smoothly works in the relevant details: the way Marie-Laur's father (Mark Ruffalo) taught his blind daughter to navigate the streets of Paris (using an exquisite miniature wooden model of the city, set out on a table at her waist height); the storied diamond Sea of Flames, the other precious treasure he must protect, through his work at Paris's Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle--a gem revealed to be coveted by a Nazi jeweler--and the leaflets dropped by U.S. warplanes, warning the citizens of Saint-Malo, France, to evacuate. We also learn from Marie-Laur's uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie) that her radio broadcasts carry more than Verne's words; they are messages to the Resistance.
And then there's the young Nazi soldier, Werner Pfennig (Louis Hofmann), in another part of Saint-Malo, who hears Marie-Laur's radio broadcast. Enemies by definition, they are nonetheless souls united by their love of a French professor who broadcast during their childhoods on the same French shortwave radio station that Marie-Laur now does. Viewers see flashbacks of Werner in an orphanage, constructing a radio, and his willingness to do what's forbidden by the German government--to listen to foreign broadcasts--and even now, in uniform, listening to a young woman reading Jules Verne in the present. The initial episode ends with a cliffhanger: the Nazi jeweler has tracked down Marie-Laur, sure that she knows where to find the Sea of Flames. There is no question that these two stories' televised versions will send viewers scrambling for the books that seeded them. --Jennifer M. Brown, senior editor, Shelf Awareness