Unless you’ve been spending too much time reading Norman Mailer in your man cave or she shed, you likely know that working women were treated even more unfairly in the 1950s and ‘60s than they are now. If a brilliant research chemist aspired to a career in science, say, she was most often relegated to rinsing beakers, and if she had fresh ideas, they might well be stolen by men, because, as her colleagues knew deep down in their recycled souls, she really belonged at home rinsing dishes in pink rubber gloves.
So there are no chilling revelations or new twists in Apple TV+’s “Lessons in Chemistry,” an enjoyable, gorgeously designed, but somewhat flat miniseries that takes on acute sexism in midcentury America. The eight-parter, created by Lee Eisenberg based on the 2022 bestseller by Bonnie Garmus, covers some of the same territory as “Mad Men,” exposing the ordinary horrors of inequality, misogyny, and sexual objectification in a boys-club milieu, in this case, scientific academia. But it’s a more earnest and less probing take than that classic drama series, with a heroine who fights the power with the kind of underdog grit that is inspirational and, in a way, retro-aspirational. The Southern California-set show is a simple tale of determination against the odds, with little of the blurry morality that you often find in more recent TV stories.
It helps that Brie Larson stars as our heroine, Elizabeth Zott, whose dreams of chemistry are bent and bowed but never quite broken. Across the series, which premieres Friday, Elizabeth fights each battle — a stolen promotion, a lost love, single parenthood, insecure men, brazen betrayals, and plagiarism — like a trouper, with a detached perseverance that in another actor’s hands might come across as wooden and off-putting. Larson makes Elizabeth into a woman who has had to suppress emotion in order to keep bouncing back, to not give up and give in. She is stalwart, and, with an understanding that sometimes feels more 2020 than 1960, she almost never loses sight of what’s wrong when it comes to discrimination, despite a lack of female role models and mentors.
Elizabeth works at the Hastings Research Institute where she is consistently dismissed, despite her obvious promise. She meets celebrated chemist Calvin Evans (Lewis Pullman) there, and he is as offbeat and lonely as she is. They have great chemistry — both the characters and the actors — and their love affair, a match of introverts, leaves her pregnant and fired from her job. Unwilling to recede completely, she does paid research work in her kitchen, giving advice and data to her former colleagues. She also uses her chemistry knowledge to cook, which, through some plot stretching involving the producer father of one of her daughter’s classmates, finds her hosting a cooking TV show called “Supper at Six” during which, subversively, she works to elevate the hard work of homemaking.
Elizabeth’s friendship with a Black neighbor, Aja Naomi King’s Harriet, is a plus in the story, a subplot with a separate but parallel path. A mother of two married to a man serving in Korea, Harriet, too, faces the oppression of gender norms that work against her career, but she’s also focused on a committee to stop the city of Los Angeles from replacing her mostly Black neighborhood, Sugar Hill, with a freeway. Elizabeth doesn’t quite understand why Harriet wants her, a white woman, to publicly show her support for the committee, and Harriet’s disappointment adds an important perspective on our heroine. Elizabeth is an intuitive, and rousing, beacon against the patriarchy, but she needs some prodding out of her complicity when it comes to racism. “Lessons in Chemistry” can be simplistic, and so every jagged edge is welcome.
The cinched waists on the dresses and the sprayed hair styles are gorgeous on this show, and they all dazzle. From the labs and university halls to the kitchens, with their bowls of fresh berries sprinkled with sugar, it’s a feast for the eyes. The design of “Lessons in Chemistry,” like its story, is easy to drink in and admire, though neither is quite realistic.
LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY
Starring: Brie Larson, Lewis Pullman, Thomas Mann, Stephanie Koenig, Beau Bridges, Aja Naomi King
On: Apple TV+. Premieres Friday
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.