In the first scene of Chemistry Cooking (Apple TV), Brie Larson, Oscar winner for Room, can be seen entering a television set in the early 1960s. She plays Elizabeth Zott, a cooking show host. She is not that kind of maternal presence and perfect housewife that was required of women of the time: she is a chemist, has an efficient attitude and moves around the kitchen as if it were her laboratory.
The women who have attended the recording and those who watch the program from the couch at home are ready with a notebook and pencil to take notes. And then the series goes back to the 1950s to tell how a scientist with no public relations skills ends up in front of the cameras after starting out as a laboratory technician at a university that, for the simple fact of being a woman, discriminated against her. work and had prevented him from obtaining the doctorate that he so richly deserved.
Cooking with Chemistry is, so we understand each other, the thematic successor to The Queen's Gambit, that Netflix phenomenon miniseries about a professional chess player in the United States of the Cold War. We once again have a powerful female protagonist, with overflowing talent and an inability to fit into the patriarchal norms of the time. It also includes the harshness of the adversities that this protagonist must overcome without losing confidence in the attempt.
In addition, it has a setting that will delight lovers of period fiction. And, in coincidence with The Queen's Gambit, it conveys that feeling of being in front of a real biography of an extraordinary person even though Zott, like Beth Harmon, never existed but was the creation of a best-selling novel, in this case titled Lessons Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. This implies that, when watching the episodes, one sees a kind of alternative history: what could have been in a specific social, historical, political and cultural context that acted as a censor of dissident characters (and wanting to be a female chemist, in fifties, was a form of dissidence).
Screenwriter Lee Eisenberg, who writes four of the eight episodes, tries to be faithful to the reference material based on two differential and essential ingredients: the scientific view of the preparation of the dishes (Zott takes each dish as an experiment) and the profile of the protagonist. He draws attention to Zott's character: she is intelligent, determined, resilient, without any desire to be liked and is consistent even when her principles lead her to work and social ostracism. Since she does not understand social codes, since her mind is rational and scientific, she does not try to adapt to them either.
It is ironic that, with a character so against the grain, Cooking with Chemistry is actually a series with such a traditional recipe: it tries to catch the viewer with the representation of homemade food, a luxurious setting that is attributed to women's fiction or those social codes that are so despicable but that can give so much play.
It even has some first episodes with a romantic plot when it tells about Zott's dynamic with Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), an eminent scientist from the same university, who supposedly has a difficult character although, in reality, it happens to him like her: he doesn't even understand. He respects social norms although, fortunately for him, society is in his favor because he is a man.
