At times, listening to the Southern characters in “Z: The Beginning of Everything” is like listening to a parody of “Gone With the Wind.” I confess to thinking about Carol Burnett’s famous “Went With the Wind” sketch, curtain rod and all, as I watched the first episodes of Amazon’s new scripted series on the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald. “Lawd it’s so blazing hot,” Zelda sing-songs to F. Scott Fitzgerald at their first meeting, our 18-year-old Southern belle clearly itching for more in life than dull provincial Alabama boys. “I don’t know how y’all can stand to wear all that wool and not wanna strip down and jump into some creek.”
The drawl is super lazy, and, too often, so is the writing on this half-hour drama. Amazon’s “Z,” whose first 10-episode season is available on Friday, is a Wikipedia entry of a show, with legendary characters defined by one or two characteristics, not least of all Zelda, played by Christina Ricci. Created by Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin, based on a novel by Therese Fowler, “Z” fails to deepen the already familiar Fitzgerald saga, which has been mythic since the doomed couple first blazed onto the 1920s New York scene. It’s a retread that doesn’t accomplish too much more than Woody Allen did when the Fitzgeralds popped up briefly in his “Midnight in Paris.”
The series opens with an image of Zelda’s shoe, which was retrieved from the ashes of the sanatorium where she died in a fire in 1948. It then jumps back to Zelda on the verge of meeting Scott in her hometown of Montgomery, a free-spirited young woman stifled by her stern judge father, played with a single note by David Strathairn. When Scott, in the Army and stationed nearby, sees men competing to dance with Zelda at a gala, he instantly falls for her. In case you can’t tell he’s smitten, “Z” telegraphs the moment with the subtlety of a billboard that reads “LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.” The show has an operatic tone that, at times, pushes the story into obviousness.
Young Zelda drinks from a flask, kisses boys, swims naked, and exhibits all the signs of rebellion you’d expect. Scott tells her, “I’m gonna be a famous writer someday, you should know that,” and she pushes him to make good on that threat. And so it begins, with their direction crystal clear — him borrowing from her writing, them getting carried away with success and money, her dealing with his alcoholism, him dealing with her mental illness. Series television offers the “Z” storytellers the opportunity to spend time showing the nuances of a codependent love story between two artists, the complex interactions that fit in between the big famous dramas, but they don’t take it.
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Ricci is fine, although, at 36, she looks a little too old to play Zelda as a teen. Zelda wanted to break away from society’s expectations, and so Ricci plays defiance with a capital D. As Scott, David Hoflin is surprisingly flat, almost generic. Like too much of “Z,” the specifics of his personality have been ironed out, stripped of particularities, robbed of life.
Z: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING
Starring: Christina Ricci, David Hoflin, David Strathairn, Jim True-Frost, Maya Kazan, Kristine Nielsen
On Amazon, available Friday
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.