Rooney’s works often center around young Irish protagonists whose passivity hides a kind of self-centered inaction, and that bears out in Frances’ carefully calibrated shyness. Oliver is admittedly a tremendous talent, and she builds layers of complexity within Frances’ narcissism, which turns her from doe-eyed innocent to emotional wrecking ball over the course of the series. The sleepy performances don’t help either. Where “Normal People” charts the devastating impact of first monogamous love, “Conversations with Friends”’ juggles a power dynamic-wealthier, married man in a fling with a young college student-we’ve seen before, and not in a way that opens up many new layers. Furtive text conversations lay out the terms of their relationship the two meet up, sleep together, worry what their friends/spouses might think rinse, repeat.
We’ve seen the mechanics and rhythms of these kinds of stories before: the lying, the cheating, the narcissism involved in believing that their story will be different from all the other affairs throughout history. The major problem, then, lies in its pace, which is a little too bucolic to handle what’s, at its core, hardly groundbreaking material. Frances’ fling with Nick is also the first time she’s been with a man (she’s bisexual), so it shares the other book’s fascination with the conflicting feelings of first love. There’s the steamy relationship that has to be kept secret for the sake of other people’s feelings love scenes that feel tender and honest even in their participants’ frank fumblings the ways personal insecurities can bleed out into how we treat others.
And in many ways, it feels like a repeat of the same tropes and thematic concerns as the prior series. That’s the major thrust of “Conversations with Friends”’s 12 half-hour episodes, many of which are directed by “Normal People” director/EP Lenny Abrahamson (“ Room”).
Frances is immediately drawn to the latter, and before you can say “We saw you from across the bar and we liked your vibe,” Frances and Nick are engaged in an illicit affair that threatens to both open up Frances’ heart and irrevocably damage their relationships to both Melissa and Bobbi. She’s popular, settled, and married to Nick ( Joe Alwyn), a dashing but brooding actor. Her best friend is Bobbi ( Sasha Lane), a brash, opinionated American who just so happened to date Frances three years ago they broke things off amicably, but the specter of their relationship lingers, charged in their every interaction and joint spoken-word poetry they perform around Dublin.īut things escalate for the both of them when they’re approached at one of their shows by Melissa ( Jemima Kirke), an older writer who finds herself drawn by them. An aspiring writer from an impoverished family-her parents are divorced, her father a low-functioning alcoholic-she’s the kind of person who’d rather keep the world at a distance than run the risk of getting hurt engaging with it. Based on Rooney’s debut novel ( Normal People was her second), “Conversations with Friends” puts us right back in the campus of Trinity College Dublin, this time saddling us with perpetual wallflower Frances ( Alison Oliver, a Lir Academy graduate just like “Normal People”’s Paul Mescal).
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