East of Eden premieres Thursday, October 1 on Netflix.
By Elazar Abrahams
John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is the kind of novel that can make a faithful adaptation feel impossible. It covers decades and multiple generations of several families over hundreds of proseful pages. Netflix’s seven-episode version, written by Zoe Kazan (whose grandfather director the 1950s film version that only covers the book’s last act), is ambitious enough to take on the entire saga, even if it does not always make the strongest case for every choice it makes.
The story follows the Trask family from the Northeast to California, where brothers Adam and Charles Trask’s rivalry eventually gives way to the next generation of brothers, Cal and Aron. At the center of it all is Cathy Ames, a woman whose presence reshapes nearly every life around her. The series has plenty of material to work with, and the material itself is strong enough to carry you through some of the show’s weaker decisions.
The performances are the biggest reason to stick with it. Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist are both excellent as Adam and Charles, bringing real emotional weight to a relationship that could easily become melodramatic. Florence Pugh is predictably very good as Cathy, and the supporting cast is uniformly solid. Tracy Letts makes an immediate impression near the beginning of the story, while Hoon Lee is quietly the show’s MVP as Lee. Later, Joseph Zada and Joe Anders arrive as the young brothers. They do not make quite as strong an impression, although it is fun to see Zada before he takes on the role of young Haymitch in The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping.
Pugh’s Cathy is also where the adaptation makes its most significant departure from the book. Steinbeck presents her as almost uniformly evil, a force of destruction with very little interest in asking the audience to understand her. Kazan is much more interested in Cathy’s interior life, her motivations, and the circumstances that shaped her. She is still capable of truly awful things, but the series clearly wants us to sympathize with her in certain moments. I understand why some readers are upset by that choice, but I am not precious enough about East of Eden to reject the idea outright.
In fact, this version is almost Cathy’s story. There is an entire episode in which none of the other major characters appear, and the series spends a great deal of time following her alone. That makes Pugh’s performance the gravitational center of the miniseries, but it also creates a structural problem. When the third act begins to unfold and the later generation takes over, I found myself wishing the show had spent more time developing some of the other characters instead of giving so much of its attention to Cathy.
My bigger issue is that the series never makes its setting feel like a character. The Salinas Valley is almost the main character of Steinbeck’s novel, a place defined by its soil, weather, history, and physical presence. The show gives us generic Western backlot sets. The Northeast setting of the epic’s opening stretch does not feel meaningfully different from the California we see in the later episodes, and the valley never becomes the specific, mythic piece of Americana that the story needs it to be. Without that sense of land, the adaptation loses some of the novel’s texture and scale.
Still, East of Eden is watchable and often compelling. The performances are strong, the family drama remains inherently powerful, and Kazan’s willingness to interrogate Cathy’s character gives the series something genuinely interesting to discuss. If Steinbeck’s novel feels too daunting, this is a perfectly reasonable way to experience the story. I just wish the adaptation had been as confident about its world as it is about its central character.
I give East of Eden a B-.
