Buzzy 2026 reimaginings of literary classics with troubled anti-heroine protagonists named Cathy are like buses: you wait years for one, and then two come along at once. And while the jury remains out on just how well Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights ultimately lived up to its hype, our hopes remain high that Zoe Kazan’s upcoming East Of Eden — a seven-episode epic Netflix adaptation of John Steinbeck’s multigenerational opus, starring Florence Pugh as the novel’s iconic anti-heroine Cathy Ames — will deliver the goods. And if the newly dropped first teaser for the series is anything to go by, our optimism looks to be well placed. Check it out below;
“When I was a little girl, I imagined that I could grow smaller. So small that the bad things couldn’t find me, and I could disappear,” says Flo Pugh’s Cathy in this atmospheric first teaser for Kazan’s long-gestating East Of Eden. “Because this world is so full of evil.” It’s an ominous opening gambit to set out the stall for Kazan’s take on Steinbeck’s classic, but one that immediately establishes the unique hook of this adaptation: the Trask family saga is being retold here from the point of view of Cathy Ames, the ‘psychic monster’ and ‘malformed soul’ described in Steinbeck’s book. Even just in this minute-long glimpse at the series ahead, we see the way the men in Cathy’s life — namely feuding Cain and Abel-like brothers Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist) — seek to impose themselves upon her, and how she in turn resists being owned or otherwise having her autonomy compromised.
The official synopsis for Kazan’s East Of Eden, which elsewhere stars Tracy Letts, Martha Plimpton, Ciarán Hinds, and — in the James Dean role of Cal Trask from Elia Kazan’s 1955 classic — soon-to-be Hunger Games star Joseph Zada, reads as follows. “Pugh plays the indelible antihero Cathy Ames, whose life is intertwined with the lives of generations of men from the Trask family — notably those of Adam (Christopher Abbott) and Charles (Mike Faist) — as the characters live out the darker side of the California dream.”
Given Zoe Kazan’s own familial connection to East Of Eden (yes, she is grand-nepo-baby of On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, and OG East Of Eden filmmaker Elia Kazan), the all-star ensemble assembled, and just how long this has been in the works, things are looking promising for another stellar adaptation of one of the great American novels. We’ll see whether Kazan’s series is streaming paradise — or destined to see her expelled from the garden of great telly — when East Of Eden hits Netflix later this year.
