Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels are celebrated bestsellers in Italy. And they are celebrated bestsellers in the UK. HBO and RAI’s television adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, My Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic), is one the best-loved and most-watched TV shows in Italy, with audiences regularly reaching seven million. And in the UK… well, let’s just say that an industry magazine recently described My Brilliant Friend’s UK viewing figures as “boutique”.
Which is a nice way of saying “hardly anyone watches it, but those of you who do, gosh, aren’t you clever?”. But if My Brilliant Friend – this version, by the same film-makers – were a film, it would be a mainstream success, enjoyed in cinemas and tipped for the Oscars. British TV drama has a brain-drain problem. In that, when we watch so many of them, all cliffhangers and kitchen islands, our brains go down the drain. TV execs would tell us that 9pm is when we switch our brains off, not on. Che peccato!
Well, a few thousand boutique viewers and I will continue to be enriched by the best drama on TV, which is now in its third series, and firmly into the mid-1960s. The story revolves around the helter-skelter friendship between two poor girls from Naples, Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace), whose lives rebound and ricochet off each other’s constantly, as the decades go by.
As we reach the events of Ferrante’s third novel, with Daniele Luchetti picking up directing duties from the formidable Saverio Costanzo, bookish Elena is a celebrated, controversial novelist. Lila – beautiful, feral, brilliant Lila – works in a salami factory.
This episode opened where series two left off, at the launch of Elena’s novel, where she is charmed, patronised and groped by the Milanese intelligentsia. It is a night to celebrate her success, yet, at dinner, she must be pleased for her dull fiancé, who has been made a professor in Florence. “We women are given the task of being happy about their success,” says the fiancé’s mother. Ferrante’s fury is etched on Mazzucco’s face.
Elena’s novel – semi-autobiographical, confessional, sexually explicit – has caused a stir in Italy and, returning to Naples,
Elena sees first-hand the alchemical effect it has on all the men she knows, each now seeing her through a prism of disgust and lust. But always on her – and the viewer’s – mind is the absent Lila.
Sublime television. And not a cliffhanger or kitchen island in sight.
