The family joke about Lee Eisenberg, the 46-year-old co-writer, show-runner, and executive producer of the Apple TV+ series Lessons in Chemistry, was that he watched so much TV his eyes were going to turn into squares. Now, thanks to Eisenberg, one of our most clever and prolific television writers, all our eyes are in danger of turning into squares. We should be thankful that this son of Needham, Massachusetts, didn’t go into the family business—manufacturing children’s clothing—but instead lit out for Hollywood.
His life story, fittingly, starts with a meet-cute. “So my dad, Amos, is an Israeli and my mom, Ronni, is from Newton, one town over from where I grew up,” he explained while sitting on one of the comfortably worn couches at the far side of the Chateau Marmont’s shabby-chic lobby. His parents met when they bumped into each other on a street in Rome, and started writing letters to one another. Ronni moved to Israel, where they married. They settled in Ronni’s hometown, Boston, their chance encounter having turned into a lifelong romance.
“As a kid, I watched a ton of TV—anything I could get my hands on, like Seinfeld, Friends, and Saved by the Bell.” (His eyes, I can report, are normally shaped.) “I also loved the movies of Harold Ramis and Ivan Reitman. I ended up being fortunate enough to work with both men later on,” he says. “I just loved stories. But even though Hollywood was 3,000 miles away, it felt like it could’ve been 400,000 miles away.”
In his college years, Eisenberg wrote a movie script every summer with a friend named Sam. “We’d wait tables and then, on our days off, we’d write movies—not very good movies, but we wrote them,” he says. The two friends moved to L.A., landing on the last street in Santa Monica. Eisenberg started temping. He knew no one in the city, and whenever anyone invited him anywhere, it was worth a phone call home: “Mom, I got invited out! Co-workers are having happy hour, and they told me to stop by!”
Eisenberg began writing spec scripts for The Sopranos, which led to interest from agents. A job on the military-courtroom drama JAG was the first time he got paid as a writer.
Eisenberg admits that he entered the writers’ room not knowing a thing about the military, courtrooms, or the law: “I just googled it and filled the script with military jargon. I remember calling my dad and saying, ‘I think I’m going to get fired.’ He said, ‘It’s going to be O.K. It’s scary. You’re doing something new …’ A week later I was let go.”
After three years in L.A., Eisenberg was still temping. Meanwhile, all the friends he’d made seemed to have real careers. Things changed when he began working as a temp at HBO and met the Ukrainian-born Gene Stupnitsky in the copy room. “That was my domain,” Eisenberg says. “I could handle the copier.” They hit it off and soon became roommates.
“I just loved stories. But even though Hollywood was 3,000 miles away, it felt like it could’ve been 400,000 miles away.”
Eisenberg and Stupnitsky started writing together. Their first script was a TV pilot about two magicians, loosely based on themselves. They pitched it around, and Fox bought it. Although the studio shelved the script, it’s what got them hired on The Office, the NBC comedy based on the BBC series created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. Eisenberg had arrived. (He would later work with Merchant, on the hilarious though short-lived HBO comedy series Hello Ladies.)
Eisenberg and Stupnitsky’s episodes of The Office became legendary, such as “Dinner Party,” in which Steve Carell’s character, Michael Scott, reveals between courses that he’s had three vasectomies. “It was a cringey episode,” Eisenberg says, even by the show’s cringey standards. It aired to great acclaim from critics and the episode was watched by 9.2 million viewers.
“We had never worked together on a show before,” Eisenberg says. “Our first job was with Greg Daniels, the most incredible writer and show-runner and teacher. The Office was kind of our grad school.”
It was Eisenberg’s wife, Vanity Fair writer Emily Jane Fox, who read Lessons in Chemistry, by first-time novelist Bonnie Garmus, and said, “This is incredible, Lee. You need to read it. This could be a series.”
A publishing phenomenon that has spent 78 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a chemist in the l950s who battles rampant sexism and misogyny in her chosen profession and ends up as the host of a wildly popular cooking show on daytime television. (After all, she says, “cooking is chemistry.”)
Eisenberg loved the book. “The dialogue just crackled. I was reading lines aloud to Emily, and the characters exploded off the page for me. I was so taken with the love story, and I just thought it was beautiful and surprising—two people falling in love because of their intellect.”
“Elizabeth has all these walls up around her,” he says, “but you understand over the course of the show why she does. Her life is like a chem lab, and labs are pristine. If you do that in life, there’s no loss, there’s no grief, there’s no heartache. But there’s also no love, no friendship, no connections. That really resonated for me.”
And so he did something he’d never done before. He called Apple TV+, which was developing a limited series based on the novel, and said, “If there’s an opportunity to work on this in any capacity, I’m raising my hand.”
Apple TV+ was something of a family affair for Eisenberg, who had developed WeCrashed, about the implosion of WeWork, and the immigrant-story anthology series Little America for the studio. Luckily for Eisenberg, they were in the middle of looking for a writer and asked if he would meet with actor and producer Brie Larson, who would be playing Zott. Within a few days, the two were Zooming.
Susannah Grant, who wrote the screenplay for Erin Brockovich, was then attached. But she stepped down to pursue another project that was moving faster, so Eisenberg undertook the adaptation—something else he’d never done before.
“When you’re translating something from page to screen, there’s logistical things to work out,” he says, “like how much of the book is told from the perspective of the dog? If you’ve never had the joy or opportunity of working with an animal on set, getting a dog to cross from one side of a room to another and sit can take hours. In the book, the dog learns a thousand words of vocabulary. Our dog was very smart, and probably knew 40 words.”
“Her life is like a chem lab, and labs are pristine. If you do that in life, there’s no loss, there’s no grief, there’s no heartache. But there’s also no love, no friendship, no connections.”
The most meaningful experiment in Eisenberg’s life so far has been the chemistry between himself and Fox, a national correspondent at Vanity Fair, co-host of the podcast Inside the Hive, and the best-selling author of Born Trump: Inside America’s First Family, published when she was just 29.
Their modern romance could have been scripted by Eisenberg himself. “Emily had gone on a date with one of my close friends,” he explained, “who ended up being the officiant of our wedding. Thankfully for me, their date didn’t take, but I saw the back cover of her book and thought, Oh, my God!”
He called a friend who worked at Vanity Fair and asked, “Why don’t you set me up with your co-worker? I want to go out with her.” And he said, “Oh, well, she lives in New York. If you’re ever here, you guys should go meet up for coffee or a drink.”
When work on Little America brought him to New York, Eisenberg contacted his friend, who introduced them with the following text: “Lee, meet Emily Jane Fox. Emily, meet Lee Eisenberg. You guys are going to get married. All I ask is that you name your first kid after me.”
“The people in my immediate family thought I was going to be single forever,” Eisenberg recalls, “but Emily and I clicked. There was a bond. There was chemistry. I never looked back.”
They planned their wedding and held their rehearsal dinner at Canter’s, the Jewish delicatessen on Fairfax in Los Angeles (established in 1931), they of the “#1 Best Pastrami” in the city, according to the Los Angeles Times (always served on rye, unless you ask). The Art Deco décor remains unchanged since its inception. Eisenberg and Fox, however, transformed it into something like the Stork Club, serving Canter’s finest on silver platters. They draped the walls and had a martini bar set up in the middle of the room.
At the dinner, the couple were toasted by some of the best comedic minds in Los Angeles, such as Merchant and Jon Lovett (of Crooked Media): a perk from spending your adult life writing comedy. Many tears were shed—from laughter.
Emily would soon learn that her husband was perhaps the most approachable man in Hollywood. She once walked into the kitchen at eight p.m. to find her husband being interviewed by a nine-year-old with a YouTube show about comedy. The man just can’t say no: a rare thing in the city of broken dreams.
Lessons in Chemistry came into Eisenberg and Fox’s life at just the right time. Newly married and with their first child, June Rose—unfortunately for the friend that introduced them, it was a girl—the story felt deeply personal. “Much of what the show is about is parenting and motherhood,” Eisenberg says. “And it’s also about grief. It’s about loss. It’s about love.”
When he came home each night to put his daughter to bed, Eisenberg bombarded Fox with questions about whatever the production was struggling with during the day. “We kind of had a mini writers’ room over dinner. Emily’s the best writer that I’ve ever met, and she knew the material so well. I said, ‘Would you consider writing a few episodes with me?’ And so that’s how it happened. I gave her scenes, and we broke the stories together, sometimes compressing things, sometimes expanding. We were reverential to the book because the kinds of adaptations that excite me most are when you feel a spiritual connection to the material. It takes you places you didn’t expect.”
The unexpected is a big part of the book and the series. “Surprise is essential to living,” Eisenberg says. “Getting fired from JAG was heartbreaking, but it opened up every opportunity that led to the next thing.”
Lessons in Chemistry, which premiered last month, just 18 months after the book debuted, begins with the most stylish credits since Saul Bass. Drafting pencils dance over graph paper, intersect, and separate, evoking not just the laboratory but the mysteries of the kitchen. Elastic, the studio behind the titles, “did such a beautiful job of transitioning from images of science to cooking, to rowing, to atoms colliding, taking you on a journey in 60 seconds,” Eisenberg says. “The greatest compliment I can get is when people tell me they sit through the sequence for every episode.”
The costuming, by Mirren Gordon-Crozier, and period music—Patti Page singing “Detour,” Frankie Laine’s “I’m Confessin’ (That I Love You),” John Lee Hooker’s “Crying All Night,” Ethel Merman belting out “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” and “In Walked Bud” by Thelonious Monk—create an indelible, time-traveling mood. Eisenberg worked very closely with Christine Greene Roe, the music supervisor, and Carlos Rafael Rivera, the show’s composer. “I tell them what I want, and then they’re able to translate my adjectives into music.”
Eisenberg may not have entered the family business, but he demonstrated some of his parents’ entrepreneurship when he invented what he calls the Nuvet. Frustrated with changing a duvet cover one day, Eisenberg came up with the idea of adding a zipper on three sides. He hired a lawyer and got the patent, launching his Web site in March. Emily came up with the tagline: “Say goodbye to the struggle, and hello to the snuggle.”
So Ronni and Amos Eisenberg needn’t worry. Should this writing racket not work out, Eisenberg has something soft and comfortable to fall back on.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends