The ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ Consultants Were Just as Exacting as Brie Larson’s Character
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One of the most telling scenes in “Lessons In Chemistry” comes midway through the second episode, when the brilliant but underappreciated scientist Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) is in bed with Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman), a superstar chemist who’s also her lover and research partner. They’re in his Los Angeles home in the early 1960s, barely dressed and bathed in amber light. As she grabs a notepad resting on Calvin’s chiseled torso, Elizabeth looks down at something he’s written, and then, with eyes ablaze, she declares, “Dehydrolicized molecules release an inorganic pyrophosphate!” After that, they kiss.
This scene is crucial because the sexiness springs from Elizabeth and Calvin’s intellectual connection; intelligence is the key ingredient in this Apple TV+ series. Over the eight-episode first season, which is adapted from Bonnie Garmus’ novel, Elizabeth barrels through Kennedy-era misogyny to become the host of a blockbuster cooking show that assumes women are smart, capable, and interested enough to learn about the science behind their nightly meal prep. Her rise to stardom is believable partly because she brings that passion for knowledge to every part of her life. The chemical properties of beef tallow are a link to other women. The properties of inorganic pyrophosphates are a pathway to her greatest love.
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Since the science is so important, the show’s creative team labored to make it accurate. “That’s one reason I was excited to sign on,” Jessica Parr, a chemistry professor at USC who served as the show’s chemistry consultant, told IndieWire. “My husband is also a chemist, and we’ll watch things, particularly the B-horror movies, where everything’s bubbling and it’s these beautiful colors. It looks really great on screen, but it’s not realistic to what you would actually see in a lab. I wanted to make sure scientists would not be taken out of the story [of “Lessons in Chemistry”] by something happening in the background that was not realistic.”
Even the relationship between Elizabeth and Calvin has the ring of truth, she said, because it begins with their work. “Just the physical intimacy of being in a lab with someone: Whether you’re going to fall in love with your scientific partner or not, you still work really closely together with other people,” Parr said. “So I did like them working together, putting together a big piece of equipment like a rotavap.”
That term is short for “rotary evaporator,” which is the kind of vocabulary Parr verified when she pored over episode scripts. “The words may sound like gobbledygook to certain people, but when you use scientific terms that would actually be used in the lab, you show the audience that you trust them to keep up,” she said.
Of course, the production couldn’t simply nail the scientific details: It also had to reflect how science would’ve been practiced in the ’50s and ’60s. For instance, when Parr scribbled notes on notepads that appeared on camera, she was given both paper and a pencil from the 1950s. And when it was time to construct a character’s lab, all the equipment was sourced from the period. Just ask Gary Patterson, a retired Carnegie Mellon professor who served as the show’s chemistry historian consultant. (Yes, there was a job title that specific.) “I was an experimental chemist, and I was working then,” he said. “I said, ‘You know, you really want to get this instrument. You really want to get that instrument.’ And they were able to get period-appropriate, old instruments, so that the laboratory looks just like it would have actually looked.”
Patterson encouraged the props department to source a contraption called a DU spectrophotometer, a device that (among other things) aided in early breakthroughs in DNA research. He also advised on the precise type of DNA research that Elizabeth and Calvin conducted in the early episodes. “We needed to pick a science that was really important at that time, that would have been coming out of the Los Angeles area,” he said.
Production designer Cat Smith had a similar zeal. For a flashback set at Elizabeth’s graduate school, Smith oversaw the creation of an X-ray crystallography lab, which would’ve been de rigeur at the time. “If you notice, there’s an area behind a metal cage,” she said. “That was where they kept the original X-ray machines.”
Meanwhile, she insisted on adding two-pronged plugs to vintage machines that had been updated with three-prong adaptors. “We had to change the plugs on some of the equipment we had, because they were up-to-date for what’s expected today, but that wasn’t how they would have looked then,” she said. “Getting something like that right adds authenticity to what we’re doing.”
Courtney McBroom, the show’s food consultant, was also a stickler while overseeing the many dishes that Elizabeth prepares in her kitchen and on her show. “We had two different schools of food,” she said .”There was the food that Elizabeth made, and then there was the food that was made in the cafeteria. We needed to show the difference.” For instance, when Elizabeth packs a lunch for another character, the roasted carrots are cut with mathematical precision, and when she makes blackberry jam, she uses a vintage refractometer to precisely measure the sugar content. It’s another way that science helps her express herself.
“We held ourselves to a specific level of authenticity because we wanted to honor the story, and we wanted to honor Elizabeth Zott,” McBroom said. Anything less would’ve betrayed a character whose power and dignity spring from her scientific method.
New episodes of “Lessons in Chemistry” stream Fridays through November 24.
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