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A career-best Florence Pugh anchors Netflix’s astounding East Of Eden adaptation

Pugh plays a dark soul who leaves wreckage wherever she goes in Zoe Kazan’s take on the John Steinbeck classic.

By Hunter Ingram  |  October 1, 2026 | 3:00am
Photo: Courtesy Of Netflix
TV Reviews East Of Eden
A career-best Florence Pugh anchors Netflix’s astounding East Of Eden adaptation

Everyone in East Of Eden is looking for room to breathe. At the turn of the 20th century, after the West was won and the United States tiptoed toward the cliff of world wars for the first time, people yearned to find space of their own in an increasingly crowded country. This was their version of the American Dream.

That hunger sits at the core of John Steinbeck’s landmark 1952 novel. But it looks different for each character, something writer and executive producer Zoe Kazan masterfully mines in her astounding new seven-episode East Of Eden adaptation for Netflix. For Adam Trask (Christopher Abbott), it’s a literal plot of land in California’s Salinas Valley, where he seizes the promise of new industry because it’s what he thinks success and a good life looks like. For his restless wife Cathy Ames (Florence Pugh), it’s a more metaphorical independence to roam free of anyone’s influence or direction, without the pressure of expectation beyond her own singular existence. For their live-in caretaker Lee (Hoon Lee), it’s a more aspirational vision to own a business and leave behind a legacy in a country that still silos his Chinese American community into cramped neighborhoods while shutting the door of opportunity to them.

Kazan forges a strikingly realized sense of place in between pillars of American history. As a country, the U.S. has a blind spot that lasts from the late 1800s to the doorstep of World War I. But here, Kazan’s story embraces a lost era when quiet possibility prevailed—for some, at least. Her understanding that East Of Eden takes place in the aftermath of one war and in the march toward another gives the Trask family a place to let past sins compound present pain.

Unlike the 1955 film adaptation starring James Dean and directed by Elia Kazan (Zoe’s paternal grandfather), the series lives mostly with the scars inflicted on and by Adam, Cathy, and Adam’s half-brother Charles (Mike Faist). The 1955 film put the spotlight on Adam and Cathy’s teenaged twin sons, Caleb and Aron, but we don’t see them at that stage of their lives until the final two episodes—in which Joseph Zada’s portrayal of Caleb is the real standout. Instead, Pugh leads the bulk of the story as a dark soul who leaves wreckage wherever she goes—by choice and by consequence of her callous outlook on life. The Oscar nominee is exhilarating as Cathy, who is as coarse as sandpaper and yet as alluringly drawn as any character on TV in recent years. With a hyper focus on this generation of the family, Cathy feels like the true catalyst for the tragedy of the Trasks, something they welcome as much as she wields. That shouldn’t discount the cruel influence of Adam and Charles’ Civil War veteran father, Cyrus (Tracy Letts). But in Pugh’s hands, Cathy is the real fever this family must sweat out in order to survive—something father and sons aren’t equipped to do. Her take on the character moves through this story with a chilly resolve to fill the insatiable pit in her stomach, no matter the hearts she breaks along the way. It’s Pugh’s best performance to date.

Also turning in career-best work is Martha Plimpton, who crosses paths with Pugh in one of this sweeping story’s best chapters. When Cathy sets her sights on infiltrating and ascending the ranks of a brothel run by Plimpton’s Faye, she finds in her boss a malleable patsy, someone she pities and aspires to consume. As Faye falls under Cathy’s spell, Plimpton deconstructs this woman in real time—she to is under the influence of the dream for what could have been. Her final scene, in particular, lingers long after this era of the story has passed.

Beautifully rendered for sheer scale by directors Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, the series pitches itself as an intimate, old-fashioned love triangle between a woman who refuses to be defined by anyone and the two brothers who see her as something to be conquered in different ways. But the real love story is somewhat surprising. After Cathy rejects Adam, the life he dreamed for them both and the sons she carried with spite in her belly, East Of Eden comes to lean on another relationship—Adam and Lee’s.

To his credit, Abbott gives an affecting performance as the series’ least interesting character. Adam is the product of a tumultuous upbringing spent slowly pushing back on his father, and yet he willingly and frustratingly settles for inaction in the face of his own life’s disappointments. It’s Lee who demands the bare minimum from Adam as a father, having raised the twins in the emotional and physical absence of their parents. Hoon Lee is extraordinary as the anchor that keeps this family afloat, a burden placed on people of color as engines of white families for generations in the U.S.. But Lee sees the chance to mold Caleb and Aron into more capable men than their father as the legacy he was denied, one he finds hard to let go as he comes to co-parent. Their dynamic, unorthodox as two men pushing through this world, is made vividly intriguing by Hoon Lee and Abbott.

If there is anything to fault in the series, the supporting cast is incredible but sparse in their appearances. Aside from Plimpton and Zada, a tender Ciarán Hinds appears in two episodes as the sturdy hand that helps push Adam to recognize what he has, not what he’s lost. But it’s Faist who isn’t around nearly enough. Charles’ smaller world as the shunned son and angry heart of the Trask family is key to establishing why Adam wants to flee west, but by nature of this story, Faist fades from its narrative. Yet, Kazan rightfully identifies that his absence, and the lingering loss of his potential, carries with it a wholly different sort of power. His memory haunts this series, both figuratively and literally. It’s a needling echo of what could have been for both Adam and Cathy.

With East Of Eden, Kazan has built a towering new standard for what literary adaptations for TV could and should be. It takes some losses to get there, but by the end of the series, these characters all find the breathing room in the world they wanted. But just like anyone else who’s achieved the American Dream, they find that getting what you want doesn’t mean getting what you need.

 
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