If you liked Normal People, good news! Conversations with Friends is a new series adapted from a novel by Sally Rooney and by the same team as Normal People. Discover an enticing first trailer.
After hitting the big time with Normal People, Hulu is once again collaborating with the show’s creative team to adapt Sally Rooney’s 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends, into a 12-episode miniseries. With Normal People director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Alice Birch in the lead – and the BBC Three co-production – the planets are aligned for this new series to become a sensation.
“Sally Rooney perfectly and beautifully captures the complicated dynamics of relationships in her stories“Hulu’s vice president of content, Beatrice Springborn, said in a statement, adding that the platform is “honored“to bring another of Rooney’s works to life, especially after the”overwhelmingly positive responseto Normal People.
The story
Much like Normal People, Conversations with Friends deals with the complicated nature of modern relationships with their ambiguities and the many forms of love and addiction. Sally Rooney’s novel follows two Dublin-based students, Frances (the narrator, played by Alison Oliver) and her ex-girlfriend-turned-best friend, Bobbi (Sasha Lane), as they strike up a romantic relationship with a married couple , older and sophisticated in his thirties.
Hulu describes Frances, 21, as observant, cerebral and lively, while Bobbi is confident, outspoken and convincing. They broke up three years ago, but remain inseparable, performing poetry together around Dublin. They meet Melissa (Jemima Kirke), a writer, at one of their shows and start spending more time with her and her husband, Nick (Joe Alwyn), a handsome but reserved actor. Their friendship with this older couple turns into flirtations, which leads to an intense secret affair that will later test the bond between Bobbi and Frances.
Sally Rooney described the book as a “coming of age story“, but also noted the importance of its setting, that around the Dublin post-economic crash of 2008.”[Même si] all the characters are completely fictional and their exploits are largely a figment of my imagination, the world they live in was and is very similar to the world I lived in when I wrote the book“, she told the show PBS News Hour.
Conversations with Friends is due out in May 2022 on Hulu in the US, on BBC Three and then BBC One in the UK. Production took place last year in Dublin and Belfast. It is not yet known if the series will have a broadcaster in France.