Stars on Screen

Italian brilliance: HBO’s latest miniseries is anything but mini, and in a first for the premium channel, it’s also its first non-English original series. “My Brilliant Friend,” a lavish drama set over the course of 60 years, premieres Sunday, Nov. 18.

Based on the book of the same name by Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, the eight-episode series is just the first chapter of a broader story, with adaptations of the other three novels also in the works. It’s filmed fully in Italian, not English, so non-Italian speakers will have to follow the subtitles — but with a story this immersive, that’s hardly a distraction.

“My Brilliant Friend” is a comingof-age story set in the outskirts of Naples, Italy. When she receives word that her childhood friend has disappeared, the elderly Elena does not suspect foul play but assumes that her old acquaintance has finally made good on a promise that she made years prior. Out of respect for her old friend and sometimes rival, she starts putting to paper everything she can remember about their years-long friendship, taking us all the way back to the early 1950s, when the two of them were children.

Newcomer Elisa Del Genio stars as the young Elena, a smart and polite girl who excels at school. Ludovica Nasti, another child actress appearing for the first time on

screen, is Lila, a more rebellious and unruly child whose arrival threatens to knock Elena out of her spot at the top of all of her classes when she turns out to be something of a prodigy.

Over its eight episodes, “My Brilliant Friend” follows the two girls into their teenage years, with Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, both newcomers to the screen, taking over the roles as the girls age.

The first two episodes of the miniseries were screened at the Venice Film Festival earlier this year and received rave reviews; and if audiences are as warm to it as the critics were, then adaptations of the rest of the novels are a really safe bet. “My Brilliant Friend” — just the first chapter in the story of Elena and Lila — premieres Sunday, Nov. 18, on HBO.