Netflix’s East of Eden faces the unavoidable problem of adapting a novel built on generations, geography and biblical-scale moral argument: where does a screen version begin? Zoe Kazan’s seven-episode limited series answers by beginning with Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh. That is more than a dramatic hook. It reframes the material around the person most likely to destabilize every household she enters, and it asks viewers to reckon with her before the Trask family’s larger saga takes over.
The result is an ambitious adaptation that preserves the story’s interest in free will, inherited damage and recurring family conflict while substantially changing where its emotional weight lands. Cathy and Lee, played by Hoon Lee, become the key figures. The approach is not equally effective in every thread: the speed of the series sometimes leaves major relationships and later generations underdeveloped. Yet Pugh’s volatile, guarded work and Lee’s quietly expansive characterization give this version a persuasive reason to exist beside John Steinbeck’s novel and the 1955 film adaptation.
All seven episodes are streaming on Netflix. For more news involving the platform’s broader screen strategy, see our coverage of Netflix’s evolving theater playbook.
A classic story seen from a different doorway
Steinbeck’s East of Eden is rooted in California’s Salinas Valley and follows families across decades. Its conflicts deliberately echo the Genesis story of Cain and Abel: brother against brother, love withheld by a father, guilt passed forward and the question of whether a person can escape a role seemingly written for them. The series retains that grand structure, but its opening declaration belongs to Cathy, a decision that plainly signals a new point of entry.
When Cathy reaches the Connecticut home of half-brothers Adam Trask and Charles Trask, she is battered, young and immediately alert to the power dynamics around her. Adam, played by Christopher Abbott, is trusting. Charles, played by Mike Faist, is suspicious and more perceptive of Cathy’s danger. Their rivalry was already cultivated by their father Cyrus, a Civil War veteran played by Tracy Letts, who attempts to force Adam into soldiering and Charles into farming regardless of either son’s own inclinations.
By first presenting the Trask brothers through Cathy’s eyes, the adaptation turns an established family psychodrama into a collision between people with competing instincts for survival. Adam offers an escape route. Charles represents both a threat and, potentially, somebody who recognizes the same ruthlessness in her. That framing lets Pugh establish Cathy not as a remote emblem of evil but as an active strategist, studying every constraint and exit available to her.
Florence Pugh gives Cathy fierce, uneasy agency
Pugh’s Cathy changes position repeatedly over the course of the story: vulnerable arrival, wife, mother, sex worker and eventually brothel madam. The performance has to make calculation visible while withholding a simple explanation for it. In the early stretch, she is most potent when the show resists softening her. Cathy treats threats to her control—whether discipline, abuse or domestic expectation—as dangers that demand an overwhelming response.
That does not make her actions sympathetic. Her abandonment of her newborn twins is among the story’s most troubling turns. But the adaptation also places her in an era with little room for a woman unwilling or unable to accept marriage and motherhood as her designated future. The tension is crucial: recognizing the scarcity of Cathy’s options is not the same as excusing the harm she causes. It instead makes her pursuit of autonomy harsher and more complicated.
Related coverage includes East of Eden Review: Florence Pugh and Hoon Lee Anchor Netflix’s Ambitious Steinbeck Series.
Later, the show offers more childhood context for Cathy. This is a major interpretive choice. Steinbeck’s conception of the character leans toward the frightening proposition that some people are simply born monstrous. Kazan’s version appears more interested in how damage can be made, remembered and reproduced. The added history gives Cathy’s loneliness and later misery a clearer emotional frame, particularly once she is running a Salinas brothel.
There is a trade-off. The more the narrative searches for a comprehensible origin, the less alien and singular Cathy can feel. Her early scenes derive power from the sense that her motives cannot be tidily converted into a lesson or a diagnosis. Pugh holds onto a measure of that unknowability, but the writing’s desire to find a human cause risks narrowing a character whose menace initially came from being so resistant to ordinary emotional categories.
Lee’s expanded life changes the adaptation’s moral balance
If Cathy provides the series’ sharpest edge, Lee supplies much of its conscience and intellectual center. In the novel, Lee is already an educated, compassionate observer at the margin of American society. The series gives him significantly more room to make choices, pursue a life outside the Trask home and assert what he needs from the people who depend on him.
Lee was born in America to railroad workers. Around racist strangers, he performs the heavily accented speech they expect from him; in private, he speaks differently, studies the Bible and exchanges philosophical ideas with Samuel Hamilton, played by Ciarán Hinds. The distinction is important. It demonstrates that his public persona is a survival tactic imposed by other people’s prejudice, not a measure of his intelligence or interiority.
An extended Lee-focused installment, co-written by novelist Alexander Chee, broadens his family history and takes the character into San Francisco’s Chinatown. This is not merely an additional detour from the main plot. It corrects the tendency for household workers in family epics to become observers whose main function is serving the emotional development of their employers. Lee remains indispensable to the Trasks, but this adaptation more clearly presents him as a person whose decisions cannot be reduced to their needs.
His place in the household also carries a pointed gender dimension. Lee cooks, gardens, keeps books and helps raise the twins. The series does not bluntly label him their surrogate mother, but his labor and emotional presence make that role unmistakable. Adam may occupy the position of patriarch, while Lee handles much of the practical and parental work that makes family life possible. Hoon Lee plays this with restraint: wounded, watchful and deeply compassionate without becoming saintly or passive.
What “timshel” means to this version of East of Eden
Lee’s biblical study is central to the story’s most important term: timshel. The word is connected to the Cain and Abel account and is rendered here as “thou mayest.” In plain terms, it emphasizes possibility and choice rather than command or destiny. A person may choose what they become; they are not automatically trapped by inherited sin, family expectation or a supposedly fixed nature.
That idea connects the generations of the Trask family. Cyrus pits Adam and Charles against one another. The next generation, Cal and Aaron, played by Joseph Zada and Joe Anders, inherits a similar burden. Cathy’s story presents an opposing, unnerving possibility: what if someone’s nature is fundamentally unchangeable? Lee is the figure who keeps the series from settling too easily into either answer.
The contrast between Cathy and Lee is therefore more than a redistribution of screen time. Cathy tests the limits of agency by seeking freedom at any cost. Lee articulates agency as an ethical responsibility, one that is especially hard-won for somebody forced to navigate racism and dependency. The series’ strongest passages emerge when it lets both characters challenge the same central question from radically different positions.
Seven episodes contain a vast amount of time
Kazan had originally envisioned eight episodes, and the seven-episode version shows signs of compression. The series makes deliberate space for Cathy’s relationship with brothel owner Faye, played by Martha Plimpton, and for Lee’s individual arc. Those choices are defensible, especially because they distinguish this adaptation from versions centered narrowly on the Trask men. But they leave casualties elsewhere.
Faist’s Charles becomes a notably smaller presence after Adam and Cathy leave for Northern California. The idea that Charles sees a kinship with Cathy never receives enough time to fully deepen. Cal and Aaron also bear the weight of the family’s accumulated tragedy without always receiving sufficient development as teenagers in their own right. In a narrative where choices reverberate from parent to child, that lack of breathing room matters.
The passage of time presents another screen challenge. Cathy is visibly aged with makeup, while Adam’s physical transformation is less convincing. This may sound cosmetic, but the story depends on viewers feeling decades of disappointment, endurance and shifting authority. If the visual evidence of that passage is uneven, the epic scale can occasionally feel more asserted than lived.
Craft supplies the sense of place, even from afar
East of Eden was filmed in New Zealand rather than California, despite the Salinas Valley’s foundational place in the novel. The substitution is potentially conspicuous because landscape is not background decoration in Steinbeck’s story; it shapes the lives, labor and aspirations of its characters. Cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh nevertheless finds sunlit, rolling vistas that sustain the production’s pastoral and sometimes ominous atmosphere.
Directors Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre work alongside production designer Grant Major, costume designer Kirsty Cameron and composer Laura Karpman to build a detailed period world. The craft does not solve every pacing problem, but it gives the series a tactile setting in which domestic rooms, agricultural terrain and the brothel each feel like distinct arenas of power.
Kazan, who created the series with co-showrunner Jeb Stuart, has not attempted a small or easy modernization. This is still a somber, multigenerational drama with biblical echoes and characters who often wound one another across decades. Its most productive departure is the willingness to place Cathy and Lee at its center. Pugh makes Cathy impossible to dismiss or comfortably explain. Lee gives a performance of such calm, accumulated feeling that Lee’s pursuit of “thou mayest” becomes the adaptation’s lasting pulse.
