- The upcoming Netflix series East of Eden has omitted an important part of the book involving the Hamilton family, a group of Irish-Americans who move to California alongside the Trasks.
- The live-action adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel recentered around Florence Pugh’s character Cathy Ames as the central figure in the multigenerational saga of the Trask family.
- East of Eden begins streaming on Netflix on Thursday, October 1, with the show’s co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stuart explaining the decision to exclude the Hamilton family storyline from the series.
Florence Pugh’s new East of Eden show is reportedly not entirely faithful to itsers of the upcoming Netflix series, the biggest change in the live-action adaptation is the omission of an important part of the book
The show’s co-showrunner and executive producer Jeb Stuart told PEOPLE that the upcoming show has also excluded the storyline involving the novel’s Hamilton family, a group of Irish-Americans who move to California alongside the Trasks.
“The novel’s big. It’s huge. It’s an epic,” Stuart explained. “One of the things that is in the novel that’s not in the series is the entire Hamilton family.”
“We get little pieces of the Hamilton family, but if you’ve read the novel, one of the things that I loved about it was Steinbeck’s maternal part of his story is in [the Hamiltons’ storyline], so that’s not there,” Stuart continued. “So it’s risky, the choice to do that, but the storyline carries itself better.”
According to the executive producer, Netflix’s East of Eden series doesn’t entirely “ignore” the Hamiltons — “we just don’t have a chance to take Dessie up in the plane in doing all those wonderful things from the novel.”
How Netflix recentered East of Eden around Cathy Ames
In this latest live-action adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, Netflix made Florence Pugh’s Cathy Ames the central figure. Mike Faist and Christopher Abbott join Pugh in the seven-episode series, which Netflix described as “the multigenerational saga of the Trask family, focusing new attention on its indelible antihero, Cathy Ames.”
Stuart shared that one of the things he and co-showrunner Zoe Kazan hoped to capture in the East of Eden adaptation was to write Cathy as a “sort of lightning rod or magnetic figure that that makes every one of the other characters sort of resonate in their stories [and] pop out.”
East of Eden begins streaming on Netflix on Thursday, October 1.
Originally reported onComingSoon.
