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Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy. This piece first appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. The affair between Frances and Nick is built on dishonesty or at least concealment, but the series shoots their scenes together with a sensitivity that makes it clear that while, in some ways, this relationship may be very messy and full of hazards for everyone, it's genuinely happy and fulfilling in others. Frances and Nick's sex scenes are a bit more glamorous, for lack of a better word, than the sex in Normal People, but they still feel more honest than most. One of the things that connects Conversations with Friends to Normal People is a way of shooting love scenes straightforwardly, so that they feel like extensions of the rest of the story, so that the physical relationship and the emotional one are always closely connected. It resists making Frances and Nick's relationship less real, or less deeply felt, than his marriage. While it's an infidelity story, Conversations with Friends doesn't position itself as a cautionary tale about infidelity per se. At one of their performances, they meet a successful writer named Melissa (Jemima Kirke), and befriending her leads them to her husband Nick (Joe Alwyn), a gorgeous actor to whom Frances is instantly and powerfully attracted.įrances (Alison Oliver) and Bobbi (Sasha Lane). They perform spoken-word poetry together, they spend all their time together, and – critically – they both initially assume that they share everything, that they don't have secrets. Its potential outcomes are multiplied its narrative paths are more curved, more tangled.įrances's primary relationship is with the charismatic and outgoing Bobbi (Sasha Lane), who was her high school sweetheart, and who remained her best friend after they broke up. Conversations with Friends, while it is primarily the story of a shy poet named Frances (Alison Oliver), is built around four people and all the relationships between and among them, over a shorter time but with a complex and multidirectional set of dynamics. Normal People is more conventional, built around a couple, around their drawing together and pulling apart over the years. The two shows feel like creative siblings, beyond the fact that they're adapted from the same author's books.īut these are very different stories. Even if I didn't tell you that a good chunk of the creative team had returned, you'd realize it on your own. It's tempting to say that if you saw the 2020 Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney's Normal People, you know a lot about how you'll feel about the 2022 Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends.
Melissa (Jemima Kirke), Bobbi (Sasha Lane), Frances (Alison Oliver), and Nick (Joe Alwyn).
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