East of Eden: parents' guide

Brutal: children are beaten and whipped, a woman is beaten bloody and left for dead, and boys are taught to shoot. Cathy sets a fatal house fire, shoots her husband, and slowly poisons a woman; a rough brothel client hurts a young sex worker.

Milder than the rest of the show: 'damn,' 'goddamn,' 'bitch,' and 'whore,' the last used repeatedly about women. Lee, the Chinese American cook, is called a racial slur. Guides report little or no f-word use.

Sex is shown on screen with bare breasts and buttocks, and one episode has a quick-cut montage of sex acts including oral sex. Prostitution is a central storyline, a teenage girl goes to work in a brothel, and some clients are violent.

Whiskey flows and characters get drunk often. Cathy drugs her husband with 'sleepy medicine' on their wedding night, poisons a woman with drugs stolen from a doctor, and later dies of a deliberate morphine overdose. Period-typical smoking.

Bleak and disturbing: a woman injures herself trying to end her own pregnancy, a mother abandons newborn twins, suicides are shown, and a young man's death in World War I arrives by telegram. The realistic cruelty, including toward children, is hard to watch.