Flashing forward to later events is a clever framing device, both in books and on screen (think Fight Club, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind). As Z opens, a fireman picks a single pink mule from the wreckage of a burnt-out house. “Things are sweeter when they’re lost, I know because once I wanted something and got it,” comes Ricci’s pained drawl. “It was the only thing I ever wanted badly. And when I got it, it turned to dust in my hands.” The real-life Zelda died in a fire in an institution in 1948, having struggled with her mental health for much of her life, and from the outset there is no attempt to sanitise this part of the story. In the following scene we see a young, carefree Zelda, laughing and plunging naked into a river – highlighting her extreme nature.As well as Ricci, who – most bizarrely for a 36-year-old with a toddler – is entirely believable as a teenage Zelda, there’s Fitz himself, played by Swedish-Australian actor David Hoflin. The former Neighbours star follows in the footsteps of fellow Ramsay St resident Margot Robbie, who appeared alongside Ricci in the short-lived airline drama Pan Am. Here, he plays a heavily Brylcreemed Fitzgerald who verges from brooding and dickish to a little bit gawky. Pursuing the feisty Ms Sayre by blowing up her phone until she agrees to go on a date with him, they're torn apart when he has to return to the war. You sort of get the feeling he’ll be back before too long, though.The opening episodes depict Zelda as a big fish in a tiny pond, aggravating her father – the local judge – with her nonchalance and awful timekeeping. Even once she’s left that stifling small-town life, she still needs to stand up for herself, confronting Scott for plagiarising her ideas, as he frequently did in real life (attagirl!). As gaslighting becomes more and more visible on screen, it feels important to give a voice to the maltreated women of times gone by. But the feminism of Z runs far deeper: Ricci approached Amazon with the idea to make the programme, having read Therese Fowler’s book Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and discovered that no one owned the rights. It is a show about a woman, based on a novel by a woman, exec-produced by and starring a woman. Oh, and two women – Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin (The Killing) – adapted it for TV. Told from the point of view of Zelda rather than her famous husband (and greatest rival), her story is allowed to take centre stage for the first time. Z is available from Friday via Amazon Prime Video.