Florence Pugh Takes On Cathy Ames, and Zoe Kazan Asks Us to Look Again

Of all the women in fiction, Cathy Ames may be the one most readers have long since judged, and Zoe Kazan's new Netflix miniseries of *East of Eden* asks them to look at her again. Kazan directs, and she has given the part to Florence Pugh, the two of them working toward a portrait more complicated than the one many readers remember. The series turns on old questions of virtue and wickedness, the kind that can carry a dinner table on the North End well past dessert. It is a good one to watch before the season fills every evening, and a good one to argue over once it does.

With reporting from Town & Country.