Sally Rooney on screen, take two

Plus, our annual guide to Eurovision. [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when Patti LuPone [enforced the rules.]( It was the week when [a whole lot of shows got canceled.]( And it was the week when a classic comedy announced it would [go past 11.]( Let's get to it. Opening Argument: Conversations with Friends tries to repeat past success [Bobbi (Sasha Lane), Nick (Joe Alwyn), Frances (Alison Oliver), and Melissa (Jemima Kirke) in Conversations with Friends.]( Enda Bowe/Hulu It's tempting to say that if you saw the 2020 Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney's Normal People, you know a lot about how you'll feel about the 2022 Hulu adaptation of Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends. Even if I didn't tell you that a good chunk of the creative team had returned, you'd realize it on your own. The two shows feel like creative siblings, beyond the fact that they're adapted from the same author's books. But these are very different stories. Normal People is more conventional, built around a couple, around their drawing together and pulling apart over the years. Conversations with Friends, while it is primarily the story of a shy poet named Frances (Alison Oliver), is built around four people and all the relationships between and among them, over a shorter time but with a complex and multidirectional set of dynamics. Its potential outcomes are multiplied; its narrative paths are more curved, more tangled. Frances's primary relationship is with the charismatic and outgoing Bobbi (Sasha Lane), who was her high school sweetheart, and who remained her best friend after they broke up. They perform spoken-word poetry together, they spend all their time together, and – critically – they both initially assume that they share everything, that they don't have secrets. At one of their performances, they meet a successful writer named Melissa (Jemima Kirke), and befriending her leads them to her husband Nick (Joe Alwyn), a gorgeous actor to whom Frances is instantly and powerfully attracted. Eventually, this connection becomes an affair, and while Nick hiding it from his wife might seem like the relationship's biggest secret, it's just as significant to Frances that she's keeping it from Bobbi. Something so big and important, something that affects one of Bobbi's other friends, something that changes Frances' life so much – neither of these women would ever have dreamed it could happen without Bobbi knowing about it, until it did. Is Frances, in her way, also being unfaithful, if we assume she and Frances have an understanding she is violating? Enda Bowe/Hulu While it's an infidelity story, Conversations with Friends doesn't position itself as a cautionary tale about infidelity per se. It resists making Frances and Nick's relationship less real, or less deeply felt, than his marriage. One of the things that connects Conversations with Friends to Normal People is a way of shooting love scenes straightforwardly, so that they feel like extensions of the rest of the story, so that the physical relationship and the emotional one are always closely connected. Frances and Nick's sex scenes are a bit more glamorous, for lack of a better word, than the sex in Normal People, but they still feel more honest than most. The affair between Frances and Nick is built on dishonesty or at least concealment, but the series shoots their scenes together with a sensitivity that makes it clear that while, in some ways, this relationship may be very messy and full of hazards for everyone, it's genuinely happy and fulfilling in others. One of the challenges of this series is that while Frances is sharply defined, Bobbi is a little less so, and she's just as central to the story as Nick. Because what is troubling Frances, what is making her confused, isn't just that she's having a secret relationship with Nick. It's that she has this relationship with Bobbi that is no longer physical or romantic, but that demands the same intimacy and confidences – and really has the same intensity – that it did when they were a couple. The story takes it as a given that Bobbi is electric, charismatic, someone everyone wants to be around, someone in whose shadow Frances has always felt she was moving. But that doesn't always quite come through in this portrayal, where Bobbi's emotional landscape sometimes seems a bit more blurry than you might wish. It's admirable that the relationships in this story are so complicated and interconnected. It pushes back against the notion of close relationships displacing each other rather than existing alongside each other, or at least exploring what it would look like to reject that idea. It's hard to make every piece of the contemplative ending feel earned, because it's several endings in one, several conflicts coming to a close together. But as was true with Normal People, the strength of this series is that it is quiet and reflective and pretty. All four of the main performances are successful; Oliver has some lovely moments in which the normally reserved Frances is suddenly lit from inside by the attention of one of the people she loves. And Kirke has probably the fewest featured scenes, but does a lot of work in them to make Melissa neither an uninterested wife to whom Nick is no longer attached, nor a victim who is sentimental and betrayed. Because we are in Frances's head, we don't spend time alone with Nick and Melissa's marriage, but some of its tricky contours come through anyway. The series features some fine performances, and it's beautifully directed to find the loneliness of an empty house and the intimacy of sitting close to someone you care about. Still, there's something about Conversations With Friends that's not quite as emotionally vivid as Normal People. The challenge of serving all these relationships is a little too much for the script, and Frances' point of view, as portrayed on screen, isn't quite enough to illuminate all these other characters and make them feel fully realized. It's the less successful of these two related projects, but if you like your dramas understated, you won't be disappointed. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend Hacks [returns on HBO Max]( this week for a second season, and while I have my nitpicks about the character of Ava, it's a really fun show, and Jean Smart is a miracle. If you're still waiting to catch up with the second season of [Girls5eva on Peacock]( you have a treat ahead. It will be a few weeks before you get to see where they're going with the Property Brothers joke, but it's well worth it. This weekend is the Eurovision finals! We'll have some coverage coming, and [you can stream]( the competition on Peacock. ([Read Glen's preview]( It's about time to catch up with Downton Abbey if you want to be ready for the upcoming movie and the conversation we have on the way. What We Did This Week [Your guide to Eurovision 2022]( Sarah Louise Bennett/EBU Stephen and Glen [wrapped up]( the American Song Contest, in all its ... glory? Neda Ulaby gave us some of her [recommendations for nonfiction books]( from the Books We Love project. Aisha [talked to]( Andrew Limbong and Roxana Hadadi about the new David Simon series We Own This City. Stephen [discussed the new Bad Bunny album]( with Anamaria Sayre. Glen and I [were joined by]( Mark Blankenship and Cate Young to meet the (very) popular demand for a chat about Netflix's Heartstopper. Glen published [his annual guide]( to Eurovision! Aisha [reviewed the film]( Pleasure. And Stephen [wrote up]( Aiofe O'Donovan's Tiny Desk (Home) Concert. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What's making Glen happy: [The new Doctor]( in Doctor Who - What's making Mark happy: Florence + The Machine's new album Dance Fever and the videos for "[King]( "[My Love]( and "[Free]( - What's making Cate happy: [Turning Red]( - What's making Linda happy: [Girls5eva]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. [Find a Station]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+](. Your support helps make our show possible and unlocks access to our sponsor-free episodes. What do you think of today's email? 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