“Lessons in Chemistry” and uncertainty - a blogpost by ESR1 Francho Nerín Fonz

Lessons in Chemistry is a miniseries that tells the life story of chemist Elizabeth Zott in the 1960s. Unfortunately, she is not a real person, and chemistry only serves as a secondary character, blending with the atrezzo. However, I’m still going to take advantage of this blogpost to quickly talk about my real passion: TV shows.

In this case, this show is based on a fictional book of the same name, so the leading scientist didn’t exist. Nevertheless, the situations she goes through and the life she ends up living can easily be assumed to be an accurate representation of those times. Telling the story of a female scientist in 1960s US, it obviously deals with misogyny and the role it played in hindering and even truncating many women’s careers, still reverberating to this day. And to this viewer-reviewer, the interesting part is that these topics are depicted in a markedly refreshing way. Although none of it is novel, instead of softening, dumbing down, or sugarcoating situations of rampant sexism, for example, I found that the scenes are laid out with such rawness that they felt truly authentic. In an age of mass-produced entertainment extruded by Netflix and the algorithmic feeling of everything it puts out, in Lessons in Chemistry I could appreciate a specific and differential creative vision and drive; a human heart behind it, in short. I personally like to imagine that such a human is Brie Larson herself, who serves as the lead actress and as a producer, and whom I found to have delivered an amazing performance, supported by a very effective cast.
​
Sprinkled on top, we get some corny lines supposedly pronounced during the inception of nucleic acid research, and others about the chemical reactions that take place when food is being cooked. Both are blurted out by the actors as meaningless strings of words that they were told to memorize, but I didn’t pay attention to their scientific rigour and also it doesn’t matter. Chemistry here is a background character used to arrive to the conclusion that we can’t control for every variable, but uncertainty may lead us to places we’re happy in. Ew. Also as a background element used to move the story forward, our heroine gets entangled (ew) with a man who is a fellow scientist. But this character diligently reinforces the accuracy of the “men written by women” online phenomena, as there’s no way this person ever existed or even could exists nowadays, but that may be a topic for another blogpost. Overall, Lessons in Chemistry amounts to a non-scientific well-made and enjoyable show, and its complete first and only season just wrapped up and is available on Apple TV+.