‘Lessons in Chemistry’ and TV History

In a scene in the Apple TV+ period drama “Lessons in Chemistry,” Elizabeth Zott (Brie Larson) prepares for her new job as host of a local cooking show with scientific rigor. Poised with pad in hand, Elizabeth, a chemist, concentrates keenly on her home television set, as if she were observing a chemical reaction.

“How does one study TV?” her neighbor asks playfully.

“Turn on Channel 4,” Elizabeth retorts.

Based on Bonnie Garmus’s 2022 novel, “Lessons in Chemistry” follows the brilliant but frequently undervalued Elizabeth as she jumps from one chauvinistic 1950s milieu — an elite research institute — to another: local television.

While the character, her show (“Supper at Six”) and the Los Angeles TV station that carries it are all fictional, they are inspired by the robust culture of local broadcasting, rooted in radio, that flourished in the 1950s and early ’60s in cities across the nation. These early days before television went Hollywood, when local stations produced much of their own original programming, allowed for plenty of experimentation and gave women ample opportunity to work both behind and in front of the camera.

In its depiction of a fictional cooking show, “Lessons in Chemistry” is a kind of companion piece to the series “Julia,” which tracks Julia Child’s rise to fame and returns next month for its second season on Max. Both follow protagonists who reinvent local television in their own iconoclastic images — Child, played by Sarah Lancashire, as a down-to-earth contrast to a pompous WGBH host (Jefferson Mays), and Elizabeth as a foil to an elderly predecessor who likes to drone on about stockings.

One of the writers on “Lessons,” Elissa Karasik, used television chefs like Child, Alma Kitchell and Dione Lucas (who toured Australia), as models for how an “independent thinker” like Elizabeth might use the format of the cooking show to subvert gender expectations. While men like the BBC’s Philip Harben, generally considered to be the first TV celebrity chef, were staged in restaurant-quality kitchens and touted as professionals, female chefs were often filmed on sets meant to recall home kitchens and shoehorned into nurturing, domestic personas.

In “Lessons in Chemistry,” this attitude is exemplified by an executive producer, played by Rainn Wilson, who pressures Elizabeth to endorse undesirable sponsors and rails against her penchant for wearing pants. “Big hair, tight dress, homey set!” he rants in one scene. “We need a sexy wife, loving mother that every man loves to see when he comes home from work.”

Most daytime television, however, was not actually oriented around male viewers, according to researchers who have written about this period. Marsha Cassidy, a media scholar and the author of “What Women Watched: Daytime Television in the 1950s,” said that these shows were geared toward women’s tastes — even the non-homemaking segments like interviews, musical performances and games. And they were abundant at a time when many middle-class wives still stayed home during the day: Cassidy cited a 1952 Iowa State College survey that found that 72 of the country’s 108 local TV stations were producing homemaking programs.

Such shows were mostly locally produced, and nearly every major market cultivated its own personalities in the genre, said Donna Halper, a media historian and professor at Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass.

Standouts included Monty Margetts, an actress — she would go on to appear in “Dragnet,” “Bewitched” and other network series — who was hired to host “Cook’s Corner” out of an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles. Unmarried, child-free and with little actual cooking knowledge, she was hardly a natural pick for the job, said Mark Williams, an associate professor of film and media studies at Dartmouth. But “she was quick on her feet,” he said, and she and her viewers created a kind of community around the effort to become more skillful housewives.

“It was everything local television made affordances for,” said Williams, who writes about Margetts and that era in his forthcoming book, “Remote Possibilities: A History of Early Television in Los Angeles.”

Ruth Lyons hosted “The 50/50 Club” in Cincinnati. Though elegantly dressed in white gloves, she was “anything but a model for demure postwar femininity,” Cassidy said. “She was brash, outspoken, had a ‘sandpaper voice.’” She even teased her male co-stars on the air about who was really running the show, and audiences adored her for it.

Lyons began on radio, like many early television performers, but not every radio personality made the jump. Some failed to look the part or find their audiences, said Halper, the media historian, and others simply chose not to go on camera. And still others, like Willa Monroe, didn’t have the institutional support in place.

Monroe was one of the most popular personalities at Memphis’s WDIA, a white-owned radio station that catered to a Black market. “She took the genre of women’s show and made it appeal to the Black woman at home,” Halper said. “She had interesting guests, she did the recipes and homemaking tips and so on, but she also did a lot of appearances all over the city.”

But because neither national television networks nor local stations (or their sponsors) were particularly interested in reaching Black women, Monroe never crossed over to this new medium. “Lessons in Chemistry” alludes to such racial disparities through the character of Elizabeth’s friend Harriet (Aja Naomi King), a Black attorney and mother. “You’re always talking about the things that keep women down, but who does that include?” Harriet asks her at one point. “Have you looked at your audience lately?”

By drawing attention to race and class alongside gender, “Lessons in Chemistry” spotlights the shortcomings of midcentury feminist politics. In that vein, while wooing Elizabeth to take the job, her producer Walter (Kevin Sussman) vows, “This would be your show. You would be in charge of virtually every aspect of it.” But the dream of total creative autonomy ultimately did not bear out for most women in this era of broadcasting — nor does it materialize for Elizabeth.

In 1952, the Federal Communications Commission lifted its freeze on new station licenses. The growth of the medium that followed, together with the establishment of a coast-to-coast coaxial cable, led to the ascent of national network programming at the expense of local stations. Live and prerecorded shows, mostly out of Los Angeles and New York, would come to take the place of locally produced homemaking series.

Child would debut “The French Chef” as a weekly public television series in 1963 and go on to become a national treasure. While her local contemporaries are comparatively more obscure now, in “Lessons in Chemistry” Elizabeth Zott stands on their shoulders and channels their style and purposeful spirit.