Elia Kazan Filmed Only the Last Part of East of Eden and Made James Dean a Star. His Granddaughter Adapted the Whole Novel, and Florence Pugh's Cathy Arrives on Netflix Tomorrow.

James Dean died 71 years ago today, on September 30, 1955, at a highway junction near Cholame, California. Only one of his three starring films had been released while he was alive: Elia Kazan's East of Eden, which opened that spring and earned him the first official posthumous acting nomination in Oscar history.

Tomorrow, October 1, Netflix releases all seven episodes of a new East of Eden, and the person who wrote it is Kazan's granddaughter. Zoe Kazan created the limited series and runs it with Jeb Stuart. Florence Pugh plays Cathy Ames, one of the most notorious villains in American fiction. No reviews had posted on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic as of Wednesday morning, so here is what we know before you press play.

The book the movie left out

John Steinbeck published East of Eden in 1952 and treated it as the book of his life. "I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this," he said. It is the Cain and Abel story told twice, across two generations of the Trask family in California's Salinas Valley: first the brothers Adam and Charles, then Adam's twin sons, Cal and Aron, on the eve of World War I.

The 1955 film adapted only the fourth and final part of the novel. It opens with the twins nearly grown, and it drops two of the book's most important people. One is Samuel Hamilton, the Irish-born neighbor Steinbeck modeled on his own grandfather, who drags Adam out of his grief. The other is Lee, the Trasks' cook and the novel's conscience, who works out the book's key word, timshel, "thou mayest." It is the idea that nobody is doomed to repeat their father's sins.

The series puts the whole saga back. Its cast runs from Cyrus Trask (Tracy Letts), the father whose favoritism sets his sons against each other, through Samuel Hamilton (Ciarán Hinds) and Lee (Hoon Lee), down to Cal (Joseph Zada), Aron (Joe Anders), and Abra (Zoe Phillips). The series' tagline is "You are what you choose," which is timshel in five words.

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Florence Pugh's Cathy: the monster gets a backstory

Cathy is the reason people remember the book. Steinbeck called her a "psychic monster" with a "malformed soul." She marries Adam, gives birth to twins, abandons all three within weeks, and resurfaces in Salinas as Kate, running a brothel. Martha Plimpton plays Faye, the madam who takes her in.

The two best-known screen Cathys both won major awards. Jo Van Fleet won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress playing her in 1955, and Jane Seymour won a Golden Globe for ABC's 1981 miniseries. Pugh, who is also an executive producer, is going somewhere neither of them went. Speaking to the Associated Press, she said Cathy "can still make terrible decisions and face awful consequences, but there can also be... an understanding of her history and her past which makes her the way that she is."

Because if we think about people that are evil or bad as being not human, we don't learn anything about ourselves.Zoe Kazan, to the Associated Press

That is the series' biggest gamble. Plenty of readers love Cathy precisely because she is unexplained, and Pugh has already been asked to answer for a more human version. Co-showrunner Jeb Stuart has framed it around the "lack of agency" women had at the time. Whether that deepens her or softens her is the question every review will have to answer.

Who made it

Kazan first read the novel at 15 and calls her connection to it both "baggage" and a "gift." She is also clear about the comparison she does not want: "I don't want anyone walking away from this thinking, Zoe Kazan, Elia Kazan." She wrote the scripts (the novelist Alexander Chee co-wrote episode six) and shares the showrunner job with Stuart, the screenwriter of Die Hard and The Fugitive. He calls the pairing "a strange marriage of talents."

Garth Davis (Lion) directed the first four episodes, and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre (The Mustang) directed the last three. New Zealand plays the Salinas Valley: the production shot around Auckland, Dunedin, and Oamaru from October 2024 to March 2025. The project was first reported, with Pugh attached, in 2022, and Netflix clearly likes what it got. Earlier this month, before this series had even premiered, it ordered a new Lonesome Dove series from Kazan and Stuart.

The cast around her

• Christopher Abbott (Poor Things) as Adam Trask, the gentle brother who marries Cathy.
• Mike Faist (Challengers) as Charles Trask, the volatile one.
• Tracy Letts as Cyrus Trask, their father.
• Ciarán Hinds as Samuel Hamilton, and Hoon Lee as Lee.
• Joseph Zada and Joe Anders as the twins Cal and Aron, with Zoe Phillips as Abra, the role Julie Harris played opposite Dean.

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love the novel and want Lee and Samuel Hamilton back where they belong, or if you have followed Pugh since Lady Macbeth and want to see her play the kind of role that made her name. Seven episodes is a single weekend.

Adjust your expectations if you know the story only from the James Dean film. The novel spends its first three parts on Adam, Charles, and Cathy before the twins grow up, and a faithful adaptation has to as well. If you want to see what Zoe Kazan inherited first, the 1955 film runs 115 minutes and rents on Apple TV, Amazon, and YouTube.

When you finish, put it head to head against everything else you have watched this year on Shortlist and build your TV show tier list. For context, here is how the 2026 Emmys went. And if the Dean film ends up on your weekend, rank it against the rest of your classics with our movie tier list. One thing Steinbeck would appreciate about ranking: every spot on the list is a choice.

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