Tale of friendship in Italy of 1950s potently intimate

In 2011, HBO began a series based on a set of books whose legion of fans had exacting expectations.

“Game of Thrones” required condensing a vast narrative, visualizing wonders such as dragons’ flight and creating a world that spanned continents.

The new HBO series “My Brilliant Friend” — based on the wildly popular Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante — represents a different but no smaller challenge.

The story of a febrile and rivalrous friendship between two girls in a working-class Italian neighborhood in the 1950s is as intimate as “Game of Thrones” is sweeping.

The series, which premiered Sunday and continues tonight, is set largely in a single cluster of apartments. Though punctuated by violence, the show’s drama is inwardly focused. It enfolds warring families and shifting alliances, but in a setting where everyone is packed close and prying eyes and whispers are inescapable.

For readers of the books, it’s probably enough to know that the first season, which corresponds to the first of the four novels, sticks close to the source material. For newcomers, that’s the story of Elena Greco, called Lenu, and Rafaella Cerullo, called Lila. They form an ardent bond during their first year of school in a dusty, low-rise neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples.

Lenu (played by Elisa Del Genio as a girl, Margherita Mazzucco as a teenager) is studious and reserved, a people pleaser. Lila (Ludovica Nasti and Gaia Girace) is prodigiously smart, with a fierce charisma and a prophet’s coal-eyed intensity. • The premiere of "My Brilliant Friend" will be shown again at 8 tonight on HBO, followed by a new episode at 9.

As the girls age, their lives diverge. Lenu’s parents keep her in school (an expense her mother resents). Lila, a shoe repairman’s daughter, drops out to work but devours books and teaches herself Latin and Greek, easily mastering what Lenu strains to achieve.

The series is everconscious of how money and small privileges change lives. When you’re poor, aspiration can become a burden; it angers your parents. If you have a gift, as Lila does, you must use it as a tool, to free yourself.

An international co-production directed by Italian filmmaker Saverio Costanzo, “My Brilliant Friend” is scripted in Italian, making its cloistered world all the more immersive. Ferrante is credited as a writer on the series, and, like her novels, the adaptation has a sharp sense of time and place without nostalgia or sentimentality.

The four actresses in the pivotal roles are astounding. Nasti and Girace convey Lila’s genius maturing into volatility. Del Genio and Mazzucco have the less showy but equally complex role: Lenu is insightful, yet her emotions are enigmatic even to herself.

In the few places “My Brilliant Friend” stumbles, it is from an excess of faithfulness to the source.

Letting the direction and performances convey meaning would often be better. The voice-over can compete with both, as when a teenage Lenu sees the sea for the first time.

We can see the awe and sense of possibility on her face; we don’t need to hear it, too.