Gus, who plays Six-Thirty, in 'Lessons in Chemistry', now streaming on Apple TV+.Netflix
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Lessons In Chemistry
The TV adaptation of Bonnie Garmus’s mega-bestselling historical fiction novel contains no shortage of deviations from the book.
And there are some big ones: There’s the complete transformation of Calvin and Elizabeth’s neighbour Harriet’s character, the invention of Harriet’s fight against the building of the 10 Freeway, changes to the circumstances of Calvin’s jogging death, and a twist to Elizabeth’s fate in the final episode.
But there was only one change in the Apple+ mini series that caused me to scream out loud at my television: Six-Thirty is played by a goldendoodle?!
If you’ve read the 2022 book but haven’t yet watched the show, this news might shock you. After all, Elizabeth Zott’s beloved canine is first introduced in chapter seven as, “a mangy, smelly dog … tall, gray, thin, and covered with barbed-wire-like fur that made him look as if he’d barely survived electrocution.”
When we meet Hollywood Six-Thirty at the beginning of episode two, he’s anything but mangy – even with his head buried in a garbage can. “Don’t eat that, you’ll make yourself sick,” Elizabeth – played fantastically by Brie Larson – says to a Muppet-like, perfectly groomed designer dog that probably cost $4,000. While undeniably adorable, the giant cartoon-like goldendoodle seems unnecessarily antithetical to how Six-Thirty appears on the page.
In an October interview with the Los Angeles Times Sarah Adina Smith, who directed the first two episodes of the show, said “I think Six-Thirty is going to be the most controversial character for fans … everyone probably had a very different idea of what kind of dog Six-Thirty was. There’s probably no way we’re gonna make everybody happy.”
While I agree there’s never a way to make everyone happy (especially not on the internet), I’d argue that not a single person who read Lessons In Chemistry pictured Six-Thirty as a goldendoodle. They didn’t have to make everyone happy, but they could have at least picked a dog that made sense for the historical era and backstory of the character.
First, there’s the fact that goldendoodles weren’t bred until the 1990s in response to the overwhelming popularity of labradoodles and cockapoos. An unneutered poodle and an unspayed golden retriever might have gotten into some trouble before 1990, but I’m confident that any early-doodle mutts didn’t look like the giant 10th generation goldendoodle panting on my screen each Friday night. Find me one person who saw a stray goldendoodle running around the Southern California suburbs in the 1950s and I’ll take it all back.
What makes their casting decision even more absurd is that the show writers didn’t change Six-Thirty’s military history to fit his new vibes. The opening scene of episode three, narrated from Six-Thirty’s perspective by B.J. Novak, echoes the book’s story line that Six-Thirty is an escaped canine bomb-sniffer trainee from the local marine base who ran away because he’s scared of loud noises.
“I can’t remember how I ended up in this place where I so clearly wasn’t built to be,” thinks the scared goldendoodle out loud while standing in a line of eager, historically accurate German Shepard trainees. Ever the genius, even Six-Thirty knows there weren’t bomb sniffing goldendoodles in the Korean War. Good boy!
In a show that does a lot right, how did Lessons In Chemistry get this one casting decision so monumentally wrong? In an interview with Town and Country, showrunner Lee Eisenberg said Gus the goldendoodle got the part because he was the best dog for the role, but a People magazine interview with the show’s dog trainer Steve Berens makes it sound less like breed-blind casting. He said, “Originally, they wanted to cast a breed of dog that was uncommon, but it was going to be hard to find and difficult to train. That’s when the series decided on a goldendoodle for the role … So I started searching for a dog that could play the part of Six-Thirty.”
There’s no denying that Gus delivers an emotional performance as Elizabeth’s loyal companion, but I’m hard-pressed to imagine Berens couldn’t have found a dog who more closely resembled the Six-Thirty of the book to do the same. I’m sensitive to the behavioural needs of an on-set canine, but it’s not as if this character is required to perform elaborate tricks in the circus. All Six-Thirty has to do is walk where he’s told and look worried about the humans once an episode.
Even if a true mutt was out of the question, there are countless breeds with intelligent dispositions that would have made more sense than a goldendoodle both visually and historically. Elizabeth Zott is a perfectly imperfect character, and she deserved a perfectly imperfect dog by her side.