Hulu’s Conversations with Friends is, unfortunately, the new Normal People

polygon.com:

In the last episode of Succession’s second season, Shiv Roy — in the midst of an argument with her husband Tom — is clutching a copy of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, which she brought with her to read out on the coast of the Adriatic Sea. Indeed, for a show set in approximately 2018 or 2019, this would be the book to have on the beach. Rooney’s first novel, which was released in the spring of 2017, was a sensation. I once saw someone at a nightclub holding it.

That a book can and should be enjoyed at the beach has often been code for an object of derision: The novel is too casual, too feminine, too chatty, too simple. Upon rereading Rooney’s debut, I found Conversations with Friends to be anything but. The dialogue is engaging and smart, the characters talking of Slavoj Žižek and Patricia Lockwood, their words often hiding underlying power struggles and emotional tensions between them.

It’s a shame, then, that the BBC and Hulu adaptation of Conversations with Friends has been woefully dumbed down and ironed out, full of awkward silences and unearned longing. The story is that of two couples: Frances and Bobbi, college-aged ex-girlfriends who perform spoken-word poetry together, and Nick and Melissa, a somewhat notable C-list actor and writer, both in their mid-30s, both more of a name in Dublin than anywhere else in the world. Over the course of the show, Frances and Nick start and end and start and end and start and end an affair. In the novel, the reason for the affair is multifold: It’s an examination of perceived power and sexual curiosity (on the part of Frances, who has only previously been with women) as well as biting portrayal of the selfishness of young people.

The thrill of the novel was the