Zoe Kazan revisits her grandfather's film with a new "East of Eden" on Netflix

Netflix released all seven episodes of "East of Eden" worldwide on October 1, the streamer's latest attempt at prestige literary television and a project with an unusually personal backstory: it was adapted, in full, by Zoe Kazan, the granddaughter of Elia Kazan, who directed the best-known previous version of John Steinbeck's novel in 1955. The new series, which stars Florence Pugh as the amoral Cathy Ames, was first ordered by Netflix as a limited series built around Pugh's performance and Kazan's screenplay, with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist playing the brothers, Adam and Charles Trask, whose rivalry over Cathy frames the generational saga. Netflix's own editorial site laid out the full ensemble days ahead of the premiere, rounding out the cast with Tracy Letts, Martha Plimpton and Ciarán Hinds.

The series arrives carrying the weight of Steinbeck's reputation along with his own family's. Steinbeck, who published the novel in 1952, won the Nobel Prize in Literature a decade later, cited for writing that combined "sympathetic humour and keen social perception." Elia Kazan's film version, which gave James Dean his first starring role, is the adaptation most audiences know; Zoe Kazan's television version is explicitly framed, including by Netflix itself, as both a tribute to that film and a correction of it.

What is different this time

Kazan has been candid that revisiting her grandfather's film sent her back to a novel he treated loosely. Speaking to Vanity Fair ahead of the premiere, she said she was "really surprised by how loose an interpretation" the 1955 film had been, noting that "some of my favorite characters are not really in it or are really marginalized." Chief among them is Lee, the Trask family's Chinese American servant, who narrates long passages of Steinbeck's novel but was cut from the film almost entirely. In the new series, Lee is played by Hoon Lee and given his own episode, written with the novelist Alexander Chee, who worked with Kazan to strip out the book's midcentury racial condescension while preserving the character's role as the story's moral center.

Kazan also rebuilt the series around Cathy rather than around Adam and his sons, a shift that put unusual pressure on casting. She has said she had the actors playing both sets of brothers, Adam and Charles as well as their sons Cal and Aron, read for either role, because "it was really important to me that there was a sense of 'this could have gone either way.'" Pugh, who is also credited as an executive producer, plays Cathy across the character's full arc, from her arrival in Salinas, California, to the toll her choices take on two generations of the Trask family.

The production, by the numbers

• Seven episodes, released simultaneously rather than week to week
• Directed in two blocks: Garth Davis on episodes one through four, Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre on five through seven
• Filmed between October 2024 and March 2025 in and around Auckland, Dunedin and Oamaru, New Zealand, standing in for early-20th-century California
• 85 percent positive score from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 7.8 out of 10 average rating, based on more than thirty reviews logged within days of release

Netflix made at least one significant change once filming was under way: executives expanded Mike Faist's role as Charles Trask from three episodes to four after seeing early footage, according to production details compiled around the series' release. The score was composed by Laura Karpman, and the series was produced for Netflix by Anonymous Content and Fifth Season, the same banners behind other recent literary adaptations for the streamer.

Who the series is aimed at, and who is watching it closely

"East of Eden" lands in a streaming landscape where Netflix has leaned hard on starry adaptations of canonical novels to anchor its fall slate, a strategy aimed as much at awards voters and older subscribers as at casual viewers. Coverage aimed at the book's existing readership has focused as much on fidelity to Steinbeck's text as on the show's awards prospects. For Netflix, the test is whether a seven-hour adaptation of a 73-year-old novel can hold an audience the way true-crime documentaries and competition shows reliably do. For Kazan, who has spent years as an actor and screenwriter without directing credits of this scale, the series is also a statement of authorship distinct from her grandfather's legacy, one she has said she approached less as a corrective to his film than as a separate, fuller reading of the book.

The casting of Hoon Lee as Lee has drawn particular attention from critics and Asian American entertainment writers who have long cited the character's erasure from the 1955 film as a symptom of how mid-century Hollywood treated Asian characters in literary adaptations. Netflix, in its own announcement of the project, described Kazan's version as paying "homage to her grandfather's revered film adaptation while honoring American literature," language that avoids directly criticizing the earlier film even as the new series restores what it left out.

"It struck me immediately as being a completely different beast than the book," Kazan has said of her grandfather's film, adding that it was Steinbeck's own writing — "personal, shocking, profound and free" — that kept her attached to the project since she first read the novel as a teenager.

What comes next

As a limited series, "East of Eden" is not designed to continue beyond its seven episodes, so its fate now rests with the audience and awards calendars rather than a renewal decision. Early critical notices, aggregated within days of the premiere, have been markedly more favorable than most Steinbeck adaptations have received since the 1955 film, with reviewers crediting the expanded treatment of Cathy and Lee in particular. Aggregated critical scores published alongside the release put the series well ahead of typical streaming literary adaptations, though Netflix has not disclosed viewership figures, which the company generally withholds for the first several weeks after a title's debut. Awards consideration is expected to follow in the winter, with Pugh's performance already being discussed as a likely contender in the limited-series acting categories, and with Kazan's writing credit drawing comparisons to the kind of showrunner-auteur attention Netflix has sought from its other big literary swings.