East of Eden (Netflix) Pilot Review
East of Eden comes from writer and creator Zoe Kazan, adapting John Steinbeck’s sprawling novel for television with the pilot directed by Garth Davis. It’s a different kind of ambition to Kazan’s previous adapted work, Wildlife (2018), in its kind of biblical-scale family saga that demands patience from its very first frame.
The pilot opens over a slow, tense three minutes: a world where monsters walking among us in human form is described in voiceover, while a young woman—later revealed as Cathy (Florence Pugh)—crawls toward the uncertain safety of Trask farm. One brother, Adam (Christopher Abbott), is immediately insistent on helping her. The other, Charles (Mike Faist), is intriguingly, tellingly, reluctant. It’s a small moment, but it does exactly what a cold open should: it tells you who these two men are before you’ve even met them properly.
We then rewind twenty-five years to meet younger versions of Adam and Charles, and the pilot wastes no time stacking the deck between them. Their subverted light and dark is written into them physically in hair and skin before either brother opens his mouth.
Visually, East of Eden is unhurried in the best way. The muted palette of the plains gives everything a hushed, washed-out patience, while a screechy violin walks a fine line between horror and beauty. The instruments overall toe that line between melancholic and sweet, in a way that tells you exactly how fragile this calm really is, but the grand, sweeping score keeps the pilot moving at a steady, deliberate pace.
After the charge of watching the two brothers together, the pilot deliberately slackens as they’re sent down diverted paths; Adam heads to war, and Charles is left to tend the farm, roles pressed upon them by their overbearing father, which creates decades of resentment between them. We soon realise that the pilot utilises a frustrating structural device: it’s cyclical; we end almost exactly where we began, without real progression. We learn nothing new about the determined, bloodied young woman who finally reaches safety at the end—other than her name. Cathy.
The pilot episode sets up several possible series plotlines, including:
Who is Cathy, and what is she running from? — The pilot deliberately withholds almost everything about her beyond a name, leaving her entire backstory as the show’s most obvious hook into episode two.
What complication does Cathy bring between the brothers? — One brother’s instinct to protect her and the other’s reluctance already reads as the fault line the whole season may be built on.
Where does an already fraught brotherhood go from here? — Charles and Adam’s dynamic was tense but on the mend before a stranger entered the picture; they haven’t had a chance or old wounds to heal so perhaps things will continue to fester.
It’s definitely a pilot that sets up more than it delivers; however, it builds a strong foundation and sets up key themes of brotherhood and the idea that people are more than they appear. East of Eden feels like a slow-burning, deeply interior character study rather than a plot-forward drama by having the pilot zero in on the Trask family rather than the wider world, at least for now. Whether that restraint pays off will depend entirely on how quickly Cathy’s who, what, and where get answered.
Will the pilot convince you to watch the rest of the series? There are a few slow moments, and the device of starting and ending in the same place without real progression is genuinely frustrating—but it works. I want to know more about Cathy and where the Trask brothers go from here.
My Verdict: Yes.