"Z: The Beginning of Everything"
Amazon, Jan. 27
A "bio series" focused on Zelda Sayre, later Fitzgerald _ of the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Fitzgeralds _ the Fitzgerald many have found the more compelling of the two.
Adapted by the team of Nicole Yorkin and Dawn Prestwich ("The Killing") from Therese Anne Fowler's historical novel, the series is unusually convincing both for an American period piece and for a biopic, that most treacherous of dramatic forms.
Christina Ricci, the former Wednesday Addams, may not be the first actress you'd imagine to play the belle of 1918 Montgomery, Ala.; physically, she doesn't resemble Zelda at all, but she has spirit to burn, a fierce intelligence and in her mid-30s is both completely credible as a rule-bending, skinny-dipping, cigarette-smoking, party-loving teenager and not too young to play the character through the rest of her short, fabulous, finally circumscribed life.
The series promises to take the couple from their meeting in Montgomery to the New York high life into which Scott's early success catapulted them _ to expatriate Paris and on into a world that eventually had no use for them. With Christina Bennett Lind as Zelda's childhood pal Tallulah Bankhead; David Strathairn, always a bonus, as the exasperated Judge Sayre; and David Hoflin as the eventual author of "The Great Gatsby," "Tender Is the Night" and "The Last Tycoon," which is also being adapted as an Amazon series.
_ Robert Lloyd
