# Z: The Beginning of Everything (2015)

> A biographical period drama following Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald's rise as a jazz age flapper icon and her turbulent love affair and marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/57073

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 10
- Episode runtime: 27 min
- Status: Canceled
- Genres: drama, history
- Created by: Dawn Prestwich, Nicole Yorkin
- Network: Prime Video
- Cast: Christina Ricci, David Hoflin, David Strathairn, Sean Bell, Ian Mather, Cindy Ralston, Gay Griggs McCommons, Jeanmarie Collins
- TMDB rating: 7.0/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4878612/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: moderate
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: mild
- Tone: glamorous, turbulent, melancholic, witty, bittersweet

## What critics say

Audiences found this biography of Zelda Fitzgerald a handsomely mounted but mixed portrait, with Christina Ricci's lead performance a point of praise.

## Synopsis

Z: The Beginning of Everything (2015-2017) is an American biographical period drama series created by Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin for Prime Video. Christina Ricci plays Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, a brilliant Southern belle who becomes the original flapper and an icon of the Jazz Age, opposite David Hoflin as the unpublished writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom she meets before their passionate and turbulent romance begins. David Strathairn appears as her father, Anthony Sayre, rounding out the family world the story moves through. The engine of the series is the tug between Zelda's own ambitions and the pull of a celebrity marriage that looks glamorous from outside but is lived out in private strain. Each episode moves through parties, public attention, and domestic friction in roaring twenties America, with the couple's rise and their public spectacle as the backdrop. Told in a single season of ten episodes, the series is a serialized look at a relationship that is charged, witty, and melancholic at once. Its tone blends glittering period style with a bittersweet undercurrent, appealing to viewers who enjoy the romance of Midnight in Paris or the stormy creative partnerships of Hemingway and Gellhorn. Set in 1920s America, it is a rich portrait of the jazz age, its fashion, and its restless spirit. Adult viewers who like biographical period drama will find much to savor in its portrait of an artist's wife.

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