Television — Noozify Original — October 13, 2026

Finishing the Family Business: How Zoe Kazan's 'East of Eden' Gives Cathy Ames Her Close-Up

By Dan Chafetz

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Inheriting a family legacy usually comes with two options: preserve it under glass or knock it down and start over. Zoe Kazan has found a third. She returned to a story her grandfather had already put on screen and discovered that he had left most of it behind. The result is a seven-episode Netflix limited series that premiered on October 1st, and the critical response has been warm enough to suggest the gamble paid off.

Kazan, an actress and writer whose credits include Clickbait, The Plot Against America, and The Deuce, created the series, wrote it, and serves as an executive producer and co-showrunner alongside Jeb Stuart). Notably, the one thing she declined to do was direct it herself, a restraint one critic called the only bold move she didn't make. Her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the 1955 film adaptation starring James Dean, and, as Variety put it, she has spent much of her life thinking about family legacy, on screen and off.

Here is where the curiosity begins. Most of us carry a mental picture of East of Eden that is really a picture of Dean's brooding, wounded Cal. But that celebrated film adapted only the fourth and final part of Steinbeck's novel. The series takes on the whole multigenerational saga, starting with half-brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles Trask (Mike Faist), raised under the demanding eye of their Civil War veteran father, and a battered young woman who one night turns up on their doorstep.

That woman is Cathy Ames, played by Florence Pugh, and she is the heart of what separates this version from the book. Steinbeck held back her introduction until the eighth chapter, and readers have long treated Adam as the protagonist while Cathy disappears from large stretches of the story. Kazan's series is, by Refinery29's account, the first adaptation to focus squarely on her. As Kazan told Variety, "Cathy is the plot engine of this book."

Now for the first twist, and it's one that complicates the notion that Kazan is rewriting Steinbeck. Steinbeck seems to have rewritten himself. Kazan has pointed to the letters the novelist wrote to his editor while drafting the book, in which his opinion of Cathy shifts and his curiosity about her grows. The narrator who first calls her a monster later pauses to reconsider, conceding that labeling her bad is easy but, "without knowing why there is no meaning."

The series, in other words, takes up a question Steinbeck left open. It does not do so by letting Cathy off the hook, either. One critic argues the show does the exact opposite of softening her, and another notes that she remains an unrepentant sociopath across all seven episodes. What changes is the amount of daylight around her. Pugh, who is also an executive producer, said the team tried to "breathe life and sense and understanding into Cathy" for readers who had written her off.

Critics have given the performance the kind of reviews most actors wait years for. The Hollywood Reporter calls Pugh terrifying and towering over the series, while The A.V. Club considers it her best work to date. RogerEbert.com praised her as mesmerizing, shifting between removed, scheming, and furious, and Kazan herself, who never considered another actor, put it plainly: "I think she's a genius." It is early for formal trophies, but a performance this widely admired tends to travel into awards conversations.

Pugh's co-stars aren't left in her shadow. The Playlist's critic wrote that Abbott and Faist deliver two of the finest performances of their careers, crediting Abbott with openness that avoids sentimentality and Faist with finding real sadness inside Charles's anger. Faist, in particular, leaves viewers wanting more; The A.V. Club's only real complaint is that he isn't around nearly enough. That's the kind of fault a performer would happily accept.

The supporting bench earns its share of praise as well. Ciarán Hinds and Hoon Lee are singled out as superb foils to Pugh's antihero, with Lee's wise and scene-stealing Trask family servant, Lee, receiving particular notice in a role Kazan expanded considerably. Tracy Letts and Martha Plimpton round out a cast announced in late 2024 that reads like a repertory company.

It would be dishonest to call the series flawless. The Hollywood Reporter notes some detours and gaps that frustrate in the moment, and warns that anyone expecting the love triangle Netflix's marketing implies will be annoyed. RogerEbert.com adds that Pugh is so commanding that other parts of the series can feel pale in her absence. Those are real quibbles, though they read more like the problems of a show with an overwhelming center of gravity than a show without one.

So why would a granddaughter return to ground her grandfather had already covered? The answer, it turns out, is that she didn't retread it. She completed it. Elia Kazan filmed the last quarter of a vast book, and Zoe Kazan has filmed the rest, guided by a novelist who spent his own writing arguing with his judgment of the woman at its center. What she asks of us is old and uncomfortable, namely whether we can understand someone fully without excusing them. Few adaptations take on a question that large, and fewer still leave it open.

Noozify's overall grade for East of Eden is an A−, the average of four report-card grades on an A-to-F scale.