East of Eden

East of Eden is a Netflix limited series adapting John Steinbeck's sweeping 1952 novel, written and co-showrun by the actor and screenwriter Zoe Kazan. Spanning generations of two intertwined California families, it reimagines Steinbeck's retelling of the Cain and Abel story across the fertile Salinas Valley and the moral battlegrounds of ambition, inheritance, and free will. The seven-episode series premiered on Netflix in October 2026.

Florence Pugh, who also produces, stars as Cathy Ames, one of literature's most chilling antiheroines, opposite Christopher Abbott as Adam Trask and Mike Faist as his brother Charles, the role James Dean made famous in the 1955 film. Joseph Zada and Joe Anders play Adam's twin sons Cal and Aron, with Hoon Lee as the Trasks' wise housekeeper Lee and Ciaran Hinds, Tracy Letts, and Martha Plimpton in support. Directors Garth Davis and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre split the series, lending it the scale of a feature and the depth of a novel.

Reviews praised the adaptation's ambition and, above all, Pugh's towering, genuinely frightening turn as Cathy, with critics calling it one of the richest literary adaptations Netflix has mounted. For Kazan the material is personal in an unusual way — her grandfather, Elia Kazan, directed the classic 1955 film version — and her screenplay restores swaths of the novel that earlier adaptations left out. East of Eden is streaming on Netflix.