East of Eden Review: Netflix's Steinbeck Series Puts Cathy and Lee First

Netflix released all seven episodes of East of Eden on October 1, 2026. Created by Zoe Kazan and adapted from John Steinbeck's 1952 novel, the limited series arrived with mostly strong reviews and a deliberate rearrangement of the book: it opens on Cathy Ames instead of the Salinas Valley, and it gives Lee, the Trask family's Chinese American household manager, an arc the earlier screen versions never built for him. Netflix's Tudum page confirmed the all-at-once release and the cast, and the series' Wikipedia entry records that Rotten Tomatoes stood at about 85 to 86 percent and Metacritic at 80 from 26 critics as of October 3.

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Those numbers put it near the top of Netflix's literary adaptations without making it a consensus triumph. The reviews that landed in the first two days agreed on the performances and the look of the thing, and they split on how well seven hours carry a book that runs to roughly 600 pages.

This is not a straightforward adaptation. Kazan, who wrote the episodes, treats the novel as a set of interlocking questions about inheritance and choice, and she reorders the material to put those questions in front of the audience early. The title points at the theme: the land east of Eden is where Cain is sent after killing Abel, a place of exile and of the possibility of choosing differently. The series leans on that reading rather than on the novel's surface as a family saga, and that decision is what the reviews are responding to, favorable or not.

A novel that has resisted the screen

Steinbeck's novel moves from Connecticut to California across three generations, and its back half carries the Cain-and-Abel parallel between the brothers Cal and Aron that supplies the title. Elia Kazan's 1955 film, with James Dean as Cal, solved the scope problem by starting late. It skipped most of the family's origins and settled on the final phase, and that version remains the one most viewers know. It is also why a full adaptation stayed difficult for seventy years. This series covers the whole book.

Zoe Kazan carries a family tie to that history: Elia Kazan was her grandfather, a relationship the series' Wikipedia entry notes. The production also assembled an unusual writers' room for prestige television, with Jeb Stuart as co-showrunner and novelist Alexander Chee co-writing one episode. Garth Davis directed the first four hours and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre the last three, with Stuart Dryburgh as cinematographer and Laura Karpman composing the score.

Part of what made the book hard to film is structural. Steinbeck wrote long, with a narrator who digresses into family history and philosophy, and the emotional payload sits late, in the Cal and Aron story that most people remember from the film. An adaptation that starts where the film started gets the payoff but loses the setup. An adaptation that covers everything risks spreading itself thin across the generations. Kazan chose the second problem, and the reviews that fault the middle are mostly faulting the arithmetic of that choice rather than the intent.

Seven episodes is more room than the film had and less than the novel wants. Kazan has said she originally intended eight, and the production delivered seven, which is the first fact a viewer notices in the middle stretch.

Cathy goes first, and Florence Pugh holds the frame

Adaptations of this book usually introduce the Trask family and let Cathy Ames arrive as a disruption. Kazan inverts that. Cathy is the series' opening figure, which tilts the story away from a family's inheritance and toward the woman whose damage sets it in motion. Florence Pugh plays her and also executive produces, and the expanded character work is one of the two things the early reviews single out most often.

The other is subtler, and it is the clearest place where the adaptation's choices cost something. Giving Cathy a childhood origin can soften the "born monster" reading Steinbeck wrote. The novel's Cathy is cold from her first appearance; the series explains her. Whether that counts as enrichment or dilution is the question the reviews are arguing about, and both answers are defensible from the same seven hours.

Pugh's presence does double duty. She is the series' biggest name and its most discomfiting character, and she carries an executive-producer credit that gives her a stake in how the adaptation treats Cathy. Reviews differ on much else but agree on the performance, which matters for a series built around a woman whose actions are meant to be hard to forgive. The novel gives Cathy no interior explanation; the screen gives her one, and Pugh has to make that explanation credible without turning Cathy into a victim. The reviews suggest she mostly clears that bar, even where they disagree about whether she should have been asked to.

Lee gets the hours he was owed

The series' second center is Lee, played by Hoon Lee, and his episode is the one Chee co-wrote. Assigning a novelist to the Lee hour is a statement about how seriously the production took a character who has often been rendered as a stage-managing servant. Variety's Alison Herman called Pugh and Hoon Lee the show's "beating heart," and that assessment tracks with where the series spends its quietest scenes.

Lee's expansion is the adaptation's clearest improvement on both the page and the 1955 film, which reduced him to a supporting presence. In the novel he is already a philosophical voice and a bridge between the Trask family and the world outside it. The series gives him scenes and a history of his own, and it hands one of its seven hours to a Chinese American writer to write them. That choice is why several reviews describe the series as re-centering the book rather than merely filming it. It is also a bet that a streaming audience will follow a literary adaptation that spends a full episode on a character who is, in most versions of this story, in the background.

"Delicious moral quandaries and sumptuous landscapes." — Rotten Tomatoes critics' consensus

Where the seven episodes thin out

Length is the recurring complaint. Kazan's original eight-episode plan became seven, and the compression is visible in the middle. Mike Faist's Charles, a major presence in the novel's early chapters, recedes after the first hours. The production also shot in New Zealand, standing in for both the Connecticut and Salinas Valley sections; Auckland, Dunedin and Oamaru are a long way from Steinbeck's California.

Across the reviews aggregated on Rotten Tomatoes, those trade-offs show up as recurring notes rather than isolated gripes: the compressed middle, the softened Cathy origin, Faist's limited screen time after the opening episodes, and a landscape that occasionally reads as not-quite-California. None of them is fatal on its own. Together they mark the difference between a faithful adaptation and a complete one.

What the numbers and the trade press say

Reception is warm rather than unanimous. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic figures collected on Wikipedia put the series at about 85 to 86 percent and 80, respectively, the latter described as "generally favorable." The critics' consensus praises Kazan's "delicious moral quandaries and sumptuous landscapes" along with the expanded character work from Pugh and Lee.

Collider called the series "a daring new perspective," noted its Certified Fresh standing, and reported that it was an instant hit on Netflix's viewership charts, particularly in the United States, citing FlixPatrol. That combination matters for how Netflix reads the project. A prestige literary adaptation that performs immediately gives the streamer a reason to keep funding auteur-driven takes on canonical novels rather than safer, more literal ones.

The gap between the two aggregate scores is worth a note. An 85 to 86 percent figure counts the share of critics who liked the series at all, while Metacritic's 80 averages how much they liked it, and a title can land high on the first and merely good on the second. That is roughly what happened here. The picture is of a series that almost everyone found worthwhile and almost no one found flawless, a different profile from the ecstatic reception a Netflix literary hit sometimes gets.

Variety's review is the other useful temperature reading. It treats the series as a serious work with a genuine point of view, and the performances it elevates are the same two the rest of the coverage does. RogerEbert.com's review rounds out the early wave. Together the reviews describe a series whose strengths are atmospheric, performative and thematic, with its narrative compression as the standing cost.

Caveats

Two limits apply here. The scores are early. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic move as more reviews land, and the figures above were recorded two days after release, so treat them as a snapshot rather than a verdict.

The disagreement is also narrower than the aggregate suggests. Most reviewers liked the series and argued over whether the rearranged structure serves the book. And the most quotable lines circulating about it come from a handful of outlets, worth remembering before treating any single review as the consensus.

One more caution on the commercial framing. The "instant hit" label rests on FlixPatrol's chart tracking, which measures engagement with Netflix's public top-10 lists rather than total viewing. It is a real signal and an imperfect one. Netflix has not published first-week hours for the series, so until it does, the commercial verdict is provisional.

What to watch

Netflix has spent several years betting on prestige literary adaptations and on Westerns, and East of Eden sits at the intersection of both. If it holds its audience past the first week, the case for letting a showrunner rearrange a canonical novel rather than adapt it straight gets stronger. The reviews have already had their say. The streaming numbers have not.

Cover: Florence Pugh as Cathy Ames in Netflix's East of Eden. Still courtesy of Netflix.