‘From Scratch’: Here’s Why the Timeline Stands Out
Netflix’s From Scratch is a breathtaking limited series about love, food, loss, and family. Starring Zoe Saldaña, the series follows Amahle “Amy” Wheeler, a young Black American woman who moves to Italy to begin focusing on her passion, art — putting her law degree on the back burner.
While studying abroad, she falls for a Sicilian chef named Lino (Eugenio Mastrandrea), and the pair embark on a whirlwind romance. Fans of the show will note the timeline doesn’t jump back and forth on the series, and there’s a specific reason why.
Netflix’s ‘From Scratch’ is based on a true story
Fans of Netflix’s latest limited series, From Scratch, should note that the show is based on a true story. The series was adapted from Tembi Locke’s memoir, From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home. In the book, she writes about moving to Italy in the early ’90s as a twenty-something and falling in love with a Sicilian chef, Rosario “Saro” Gullo before eventually losing him to cancer.
“About 20% of it is hardcore fact,” showrunner Attica Locke told Tudum. “Some places in our series — down to where things are placed on the set and where people are standing — are exact mirror images of what actually happened.”
Here’s why the timeline stands out
When the Locke sisters began working on the series, it was important to them that they moved along a linear timeline so that the audience would experience things as Amy experienced them.
“We knew we needed to tell it in a linear fashion, not mosaic,” Tembi told Shadow and Act. “That was one of the first decisions we made because we felt that if we were going to ask the audience to go into deep grief, to go into hard places, we didn’t want them to get lost in time and space by switching up.”
This is why audiences have had such a visceral reaction to the series.
Tembi Locke couldn’t watch too much of ‘From Scratch’
Though she wrote the scripts, was an executive producer, and was on set often, Tembi Locke could not watch too much of the Netflix limited series. After all, Amy and Lino’s experiences mirrored her life experiences and the moments she had with her late husband, Soro.
“I didn’t watch the visuals because I want to maintain and protect my own memories,” she told TODAY. “Suddenly, you start to remember the thing that was made, and you forget the original images.”
Fans of Locke’s memoir know how much she adored her late husband from her writing about him. “He soothed the places I hadn’t known needed soothing, seemed perfectly willing to embrace the parts of me that were wanton, unsettled, unfinished, and contradictory,” she writes. “Together we had engaged life as two forks eating off one plate. Ready to listen, to love, to look into the darkness and see a thin filament of the moon.”
