The Secrets She Keeps
“Have you heard about the New Normal?” asked the signi cant other last week.
“I haven’t nished watching the old Normal yet,” says I. “Is the new one any use? Do you think they will go mad about it on Liveline?” For umpteen weeks Normal People gathered us round the virtual watercooler as we obsessed about silver chains, bare skin, the tourist potential of Tubbercurry and the coolness of college. Normal People (not to be confused with Ordinary People the soppy tearjerker that somehow li ed the 1980 Best Picture Oscar from Raging Bull), took Sally Rooney’s novel about young love and gave it sound and vision. e timing was perfect: a world in lockdown populated by couch potatoes, not that we wouldn’t have swooned and switched on anyway.
Now that it is gone (still available on RTÉ Player for the ve people in the country who haven’t yet seen it), there is a new show lling the Normal People- sized hole in the RTÉ schedule. e Secrets She Keeps is Australian, has your one from Downton Abbey (Laura Carmichael) and sounds as much like Normal People as a kookaburra. e twisty tale, adapted by Michael Robotham from his 2017 bestseller, centres on two women (played by Carmichael and Jessica De Gouw), both heavily pregnant but from di erent social strata. Carmichael’s single lady stacks shelves in the local supermarket, De Gouw is a married mother living in a posh house. Carmichael sees the faraway hills and is green with envy.
“Both women have secrets” is the PR blurb for e Secrets She Keeps. But do either of them have a desirable chain like Connell or a must-have retro fringe like Marianne? “Both will risk everything to conceal the truth” it goes on. But will they really? Will they risk their GAA career? Will they play roulette with their souls? And while both women’s worlds “will collide in one shocking act that cannot be undone” there is also extraordinary in the ordinary.
e Secrets She Keeps, which debuted in Oz in April, was favourably reviewed and became a popular hit, a twisty psychological thriller about the haves and have-nots and nasty skeletons falling out of closets. Normal People had nothing as dramatic but was radical, as director Lenny Abrahamson put it, for other reasons: a show that dared to be about normal people falling in love in these sometimes cynical times. But while e Secrets She Keeps is unlikely to stir the ames of outrage or desire, and may not ll that hole in your TV heart, just remember that that’s normal too.
Watch it! The Secrets She Keeps, Tuesday, RTÉ One; Normal People is available on RTÉ Player