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John Steinbeck's acclaimed 1952 novel East of Eden is a tale of how familial patterns repeat through the generations, and how hard it is to step off of what seems to be a predestined path. So it seems fitting that Netflix's new 7-episode adaptation of the book comes from a writer who wants to take a different approach than her grandfather did to the same material 70 years ago.
Steinbeck's book focuses on two generations of men in the Trask family. In the first, Adam and Charles are half-brothers frequently pitted against each other by their abusive father Cyrus, then split apart by the arrival of Cathy Ames, a beautiful sociopath who wraps men (and sometimes women) around her finger with seemingly no effort. In the second, Adam's sons Cal and Aron have their own Cain and Abel-style conflict. The 1955 movie version, directed by Elia Kazan and starring James Dean as Cal, begins when Cal and Aron are already young adults, and features Adam and Cathy as supporting characters. The new Netflix version, adapted and mostly written by Elia's granddaughter Zoe Kazan, tackles the whole book, devoting its first five hours to material absent from the film.
Some of this is just the nature of the evolving media landscape. The movie is a shade under two hours. Even if Elia had used the juice from directing On the Waterfront to demand a more epic length, he still wouldn't have been able to squeeze in all of the incidents from the book. By the mid-Seventies, television limited series had established themselves as a more ideal format for adapting epic novels. (In fact, there was a 1981 TV version starring Jane Seymour as Cathy, which I haven't seen.) Zoe's version is more than three times longer than her grandfather's, and is so expansive that there's even room to add a sequence that's not in the book, about Lee, the Chinese-American cook who becomes more of a father figure to Cal and Aron than Adam is capable of being.
But the bonus Lee material (in an episode co-written by Alexander Chee) speaks to the other reason for the younger Kazan to revisit the source material. Not only can she add back in characters and stories and themes that her grandfather didn't have room for (or interest in?), but she can look at certain aspects of this story through a more modern lens, particularly with how she writes about Cathy and Lee.