Imagine Mad Men with only a serviceable script and set in academia instead of Madison Avenue and you will have a fair idea of Lessons in Chemistry, Apple TV+’s adaptation of the Bonnie Garmus bestseller of the same name.
The eight-part drama stars Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott, a chemistry genius whose fulfilment of her potential has been thwarted at every turn by the entrenched sexism of her era, the late 1950s. After being effectively forced to leave college before completing her PhD, we meet her working as a lab assistant – and coffee-maker – for a team of scientists who are intellectually inferior but blessed with the Y chromosome.
