With Friends like these I longed for Derry Girls
Conversations With Friends
RTÉ One, Wednesday/BBC Three, Sunday
Derry Girls
Channel 4, Tuesday/Wednesday
Hacks
Streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Normal People was the series we needed so soon into the first lockdown two years ago. Deprived in many cases of being able to have proper chats ourselves, there was something reassuring in the stilted exchanges between Connell and Marianne. If we couldn’t communicate, why should they enjoy the luxury? Their teenage and twentysomething angst languorously played out over 12 half-hour episodes, and it was a perfectly judged pace. I had read the novel, and found the television series better. When you read, you read at the same speed, no matter what the content. In the dramatic adaption, the star-crossed duo’s silences were as important as what they said. It never felt like padding – it just felt real.
The same cannot be said, sadly, for Conversations With Friends. There’s nothing wrong with the adaptation, the direction, the music, the production design, the acting, any of it. The problem is a simple one – after two episodes, I hate every character in it.
Admirably played by newcomer Alison Oliver, student and aspiring poet Frances is a drip. Her fellow poet and American former lover, Bobbi (Sasha Lane) is brash, selfish, and selfobsessed. Author Melissa (Jemima Kirke), who they befriend, is haughty, while her actor husband Nick (Joe Alwyn) is as animated as a discarded Disney drawing.
He and Frances talk… to… each… other so slowly and with so little content they make Connell and Marianne seem like excited Spanish students on the top deck of a Dublin bus. Their illicit kiss, which should have been enjoyed, one imagines, instead just became the foundation of more angst. Meanwhile, Bobbi and Melissa have been kissing too, making this less of a modern-day La Ronde as it was a sort of slow bike lane for vegans.
From Nick and Melissa’s deathly chic house to life on the cobbles in Trinity College, it all reeks of middle-class indulgence.
Poets, authors, actors, the usual fashionable milieu described by author Sally Rooney, but with precious little to say about life in general, just this niche corner of it, makes it hard to see why anyone would care about any of them.
I’ll stick with it, because Rooney has been touted as the voice of her generation, and one always should at least make an effort to be aware of that generation’s mores, fears, and passion. For now, though, I fear it might just be Generation Zzzz as I’m slowly lulled to sleep.
Contrast this lot with Erin, Orla, Michelle, Claire and James in Derry Girls, which came to an end on Channel 4. These were teenagers with real issues to deal with. The finale marked the days leading up to the referendum on the Good Friday Agreement and in particular the wrestling with conscience over the fact paramilitary prisoners would be released if it was passed.
We learned that Michelle’s brother Niall was one of them, sentenced for killing a man, but there were no easy answers about what would be best – leaving him there, or allowing his release, no matter how repugnant to many, to win the peace everyone craved in 1998.
The episode ended with all the main characters in their polling booths. Liam Neeson made another appearance as an RUC Inspector, and with the merest flicker of facial expressions conveyed the complexity of the Troubles. You could almost hear him thinking of his murdered colleagues, of the civilians they too had often brutalised and killed, of the fact the RUC itself would be replaced by a new, non-sectarian police force and be
consigned to the past to make way for a brighter future.
Erin spoke to the wee English fella, James, confessing her fears of growing up, but concluding that even if their dreams were broken, they would make new ones from the pieces.
‘You should write that down,’ he told her.
‘Maybe I will, some day,’ she smiled.
Of course, Erin is based on Lisa McGee, who writes the show, and it was a lovely moment. She did indeed write it some day, and how. Seventeen episodes of sheer perfection, an extraordinary blend of universal family experience, coping with life in extraordinary times, and doing it all through some of the sharpest TV comedy ever before the rug was pulled from under the audience by the stark realities of life back then, is some legacy. Erin need not have been afraid at all.
By the end of it, I was an emotional wreck, even as the Good Friday Agreement itself now feels under threat. I certainly felt more like finding out what happened to this bunch of young people who had to deal with proper experiences than I did about a couple of dodgy poets and their vapid, monosyllabic lives.
I missed out on Hacks, a US series on Amazon Prime about a fading comedy star in the mould of Joan Rivers, when it first arrived on these shores. Last weekend, I did something I seldom do, and binged all 10 episodes. Jean Smart, so good in everything from Frasier to Mare Of Easttown, never has been better, and is beautifully matched with Hannah Einbinder as the young writer hired to make her act more relevant to a new audience.
Their odd couple relationship is a (often foul-mouthed) joy, and I urge you to catch up with it before the second series debuts next month.