![]() This switch-up is emblematic of the good intentions showrunner Lee Eisenberg (writer for The Office and co-creator of Jury Duty) and his writers bring to this material, as well as Lessons in Chemistry’s chief shortcoming: an inability to adapt its source material in startling or illuminating ways. This reimagination of Harriet, the most significant departure from the original text in this handsome if unchallenging adaptation, forces the Apple TV+ Lessons to tackle something the book does not: the civil-rights movement that brought racial tensions to an unignorable boil during the era in which this story takes place. But she’s also a Black woman living in a Black neighborhood (minus Calvin and Elizabeth, the only white people residing closeby) an intelligent, aspiring lawyer who’s happily married to a military doctor and a mother of four young children trying to pursue her own very active dreams. She’s still a neighbor of the two scientifically gifted protagonists. In Lessons in Chemistry, the Apple TV+ series based on Garmus’s book, Harriet is scarcely any of those things. Blunt-spoken and unhappily married to a caricature of a bad husband - Garmus describes him as “dull” and “stupid” with “a thicket of body hair” - Harriet becomes both the regular babysitter for Mad, Elizabeth and Calvin’s daughter, and a representative of every unfulfilled white woman who discovers new possibilities past what is supposed to be her prime. In Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus’s wildly popular, 1960s-set debut novel, Harriet is the nosy neighbor of cohabitating chemists Calvin Evans and Elizabeth Zott. The handsome Apple TV+ adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’s best-selling novel is carefully considered and completely uninterested in challenging its audience.
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