Eons ago, when I was a freshman in college, I learned that "licking" was the art of adapting a story or novel to a movie script. That use of "licking" seems to have vanished, which is unsurprising in an age when actual licking (and other such things) is a staple of film fare.
In any event, I use "licking" here to mean the adaptation of a piece of literature to a script. The script in this case is that of Lessons in Chemistry, a 2023 release on Apple TV+, which in eight episodes veers wildly from the novel on which it is based: Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, by Bonnie Garmus. The novel and the TV adaptation are set in the 1950s.
"Licking" sometimes involved changing the ending of the story. And the writers of the TV version certainly did that. But that was the least of their sins. The most of their sins was their feat of making Garmus's story even more woke than the print version.
The book is a long, feminist rant. The TV adaptation is a feminist, racist rant, amplified through a bullhorn. Things that aren't in the book but which are in the TV version:
Calvin Evans (the white, male protagonist) and Elizabeth Zott (the white, female protagonist) live in a black neighborhood.
There is a black neighbor woman (more about her below) who abandoned her law career to put her husband through medical school.
The same black woman leads a crusade to keep the corrupt, all-white, city council and greedy developers from replacing the neighborhood with a freeway.
Elizabeth Zott, who (for reason too convoluted to discuss here) becomes the host of a successful TV show about cooking (an early Julia Child). That much is in the books. But when Elizabeth alienates her sponsor -- the maker of a hydrogenated shortening -- she manages to replace that sponsor with ... Tampax. Not in the book, but essential to the arch-feminist tone of the TV series.
Calvin Evans, as a child, is placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. That's in the book. What's not in the book is that he's held back from adoption because the priests exploit his nascent brilliance as a chemist to distill and sell bootleg whiskey.
A clergyman -- white in the book, black in the TV show -- helps Calvin's daughter, Mad Zott, find the orphanage. The book's clergyman didn't know Calvin; the TV's show's clergyman was a long-lost friend.
Similar things can happen relatively infrequently -in life but when they're packed into a single TV series, you know that you're getting a message like this one:
White folks and black folks can get along just fine -- as long as white folks are willing.
White folks who live among and socialize with black folks are open-minded, loving people. (How about white folks who live among or near violent black folks? Are they open-minded and loving or just stupid or too poor to move?)
Bad things happen to black folks because of white folks. (Hmm ... that's the theme of CRT, which fails to acknowledge the weighty burdens of lower intelligence and a culture of irresponsibility and violence.)
Catholic priests are b-a-a-d people, unless they're homosexuals. (Sodomizing young boys is really bad, but it's usually done by homosexuals, which is why the badness shown in the TV version skirted that issue.)
About that black neighbor woman: Like the black neighborhood, she didn't exist in the book. The middle-aged, white housewife who befriended Elizabeth in the book had to be replaced by a younger, black housewife-lawyer-crusader. In other words, more of the same: arch-feminism and racism.
The book was a feel-good story that probably appealed mainly to white women in search of escape and a bit of inner rebellion. The TV series is a feel-good story for well-off white folks of the kind who hate Donald Trump and believe that anyone who might vote for him is a misogynist, racist Neanderthal.