SERIES PREMIERE: The Z in the title of this new Amazon series stands for Zelda, as in Zelda Fitzgerald, the famously unstable but spirited wife of writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. The rest of the title,
The Beginning of Everything, refers to the author’s assessment of her importance to his life. When she entered it, he wrote, her entrance was… “the beginning of everything.” In this series, Zelda is played by Christina Ricci, who gets the coquette-ishness down just fine. David Hoflin co-stars as Zelda’s future husband, but he doesn’t make the same vivid impression as Zelda with a Z. For a better pairing of Fitzgeralds, see Woody Allen’s 2011 time-traveling comedy
Midnight in Paris, with a great Zelda and an equally great F. Scott. In that movie, Zelda was played by Alison Pill of HBO’s
The Newsroom, and Scott was played by Tom Hiddleston, of
The Night Manager and Loki in the
Avengers and
Thor Marvel Comics movies. For a full review,
see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.