For fans of peak TV, the debut of “Lessons in Chemistry” is a sublime confection that sets a new table for period drama enthusiasts looking for a show with bite. For fans of the bestselling 2022 novel written by Bonnie Garmus, the miniseries is a highly anticipated adaptation.

An ensemble cast, led by showrunner Lee Eisenberg (“The Office”), stars Academy Award-winner Brie Larson (“Room,” “Captain Marvel”) slaying her role as a thwarted 1950s scientist named Elizabeth Zott who finds revenge — and redemption — as the host of a protofeminist cooking show.

Our heroine is a stoic 30-something chemist, employed as little more than a coffee maker at a venerated science lab. She is at the center of this classic woman-against-the-world melodrama, with spicy wit. When Elizabeth is finally thrown out of the lab for being an unwed mother, she stumbles into hosting a local TV cooking show, where her nonconformist expertise in the kitchen makes her a star.

Elizabeth is an odd bodkin who happens to look like Grace Kelly. When she falls in love with another eccentric scientist, Calvin, played by Lewis Pullman (“Top Gun: Maverick”), the two are irresistible.

Readers have debated whether Elizabeth and her paramour are on the autism spectrum. They are STEM smarties, sure, but they are also “social flops” who often misread the room, are picky in their habits and have difficulty managing their emotions that others read as insensitivity.

“NeuroTribes” author Steve Silberman, whose work is legend in autism civil rights, said we are witnessing a “golden era” in pop culture that celebrates the humanity of neurodiversity, rather than the 20th century cliches that showed those with autism as one-dimensional shut-ins.

Silberman, showrunner Eisenberg and show supervisor Shamell Bell (“The Hate U Give”) spoke to the Chronicle about the most powerful subplot: the razing of Los Angeles’Sugar Hill, where Calvin and Elizabeth live and fall in love.

Sugar Hill, now known as the West Adams neighborhood, was an affluent Black neighborhood, and our two chemists are portrayed as its only white residents. In the 1950s, Los Angeles decided to build Interstate 10 through the Sugar Hill community, destroying it forever. There were protests at the time, and in this TV story, one of the leaders is a brilliant attorney named Harriet, played by Aja Naomi King (“How to Get Away With Murder”), who happens to be Calvin and Elizabeth’s next-door neighbor.

In the script, Calvin moves to Sugar Hill seemingly oblivious to the fact that he lives in a Black neighborhood, or the existential threats that face their community. He is “color-blind” and truly admires Harriet and her children. When Elizabeth joins him, it’s a regular “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Or is it?

If the white protagonists are on the spectrum, is it believable that they’d be so clueless to a cultural upheaval around them?

Silberman, who hadn’t seen the show at the time of this interview, thinks it’sjustplausible.

“On the other hand, a passion for social justice is practically diagnostic — awareness of unfairness is a highlight among those on the spectrum,” he said. “These characters might be oblivious and naive. But once they figured it out, it would bother them.”

In that case, the script proves its worth, because Elizabeth draws closer to Harriet over time and cannot whitewash her conviction for civil rights, even when her TV advertisers want her to shut up and bake a cake.

Bell, who served as a cultural historian on the program and was responsible for setting up the Sugar Hill location storyline, agreed with Silberman’s insight. “I have a 12-year-old autistic son,” she said. “I get it.”

But she knew the characters had to be realistically portrayed every inch of the way.

“I did a cultural mapping of Los Angeles starting in the 1930s, 1940s, up to 1950s, to examine the influences that might form an authentic connection between a Black and white family,” she explained. “Calvin needed to beinthe Black community, he needed to have a real relationship with his neighbors. There’s no way Harriet was going to be a caretaker, a nanny, an ‘instant best friend.’ ”

To that end, Bell worked extensively with King.

“We wanted Harriet to be the embodiment of the Black women who were the heartbeat of the civil rights movements in the 1950s and ’60s,” she said. “The story question was: How would we illuminate Elizabeth’s character as an outlier? Why would a Black woman trust a white woman so quickly? What is the role of Elizabeth’s feminism? It can’t be the white-savior complex. She has to be a listener. She has to be someone that’s action-oriented. She has to put herself on the line, but she also has to know how to step back.”

When it came to the script, Eisenberg said he didn’t think in terms of neurodiversity (nor did Garmus use that description in her novel).

“我们没有考虑大p’ political,” he said. “We wanted to show the background, the family origins of our characters, to show how they arrived at their unique situation.”

Eisenberg credited Bell’s contribution, with examples such as when Elizabeth comes home glowing from her show, confiding to Harriet that she has worn pants instead of a dress on TV. Harriet, weary of speaking at yet another Los Angeles council meeting where the white city officials act like her neighborhood is a blighted piece of nothing, courteously clocks Elizabeth with a few choice facts about the differing degrees of their struggles.

伊丽莎白卷了一会儿,但是她的智慧persists. The unfairness is obvious. Yes, she’s going to wear pants on TV, and take up a broader fight.

The beauty of “Lessons in Chemistry” comes from these details, the writing and the ensemble work of every character. It could have been just another Cinderella, but the miniseries is a work of promise that happens to be about women’s integrity.

As Elizabeth invokes at the end of her kitchen experiments: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”

Susie Brightis a freelance writer.