Conversations with Friends

Where Normal People ran consistently hot, Conversations with Friends struggles to warm itself up. With long stretches in which very little happens, the overly long 12-episode run dilutes the intensity of relationships that end up feeling inconsequential.

We get lots of meaningful looks, covert glances or charged/pained/strained silences, and very little in between to guide us. When everything is evoked, nothing is. Such great gaps make a nonsense of the script, even when the lines themselves are good.

If Conversations With Friends excels at capturing the finer details of their interactions, however, it’s somewhat less convincing at conveying the warmth or heat coursing underneath them. In part, it’s a problem of chemistry. ... Oliver and Alwyn generate only mild friction together. ... Better together are Oliver and Lane, especially when Conversations With Friends is able to dive into the longstanding well of love between their characters.

A fraught, often upsetting look at how the strongest feelings of love can break us apart and scatter what we know of ourselves. Rooney remains a singular voice – but this one might remain better on the page.

A script that is both sparse and overdetermined, one that at times makes its characters voice what would otherwise remain an inner monologue in Rooney’s words. (“You’re thinking things and not saying them,” Frances is told at one point.) It’s no surprise the series feels most electric when it forgoes dialogue altogether.

“Conversations With Friends” follows the “Normal People” pattern so closely that it often feels more like a faded impression rather than its own series. In trying to replicate what made the “Normal People” adaptation work, with the same creative team to boot, this version of “Conversations With Friends” becomes strangely bland, as if leeched of all its flavor.

For perhaps too much of the series’s twelve-episode run, the hush at its center proves frustrating. Frances is so recessive that she’s almost a non-character. ... There is the payoff of the series’s last couple of episodes, at least, in which Rooney’s thesis is laid out and we feel the rush of an aching nostalgia for our own wobbly-legged first steps into the adult world, both plodding and reckless. This is, perhaps, an advertisement for the experience of reading the novel.

Birch, Abrahamson and company are using Rooney’s first novel, but everything that seemed so magical and easy in 2020 is more labored this time around.

The series attempts to explore all avenues of it–albeit mostly via angsty debriefs and loaded, silent looks. But wanting comes from the heart, and unfortunately, somewhere between the page and the screen, this story became bloodless.

With a directionless script, an uninspired central performance, and frustrating pacing, Conversations with Friends fails to earn the Sally Rooney-verse another victory.

We would have really liked Conversations With Friends if it were a movie or maybe even a four-part limited series. But there just doesn’t seem to be enough narrative energy to sustain the story for 12 episodes.

The simplicity of the plot gives away the disastrous overconfidence in stretching the story out to 12 half-hour chapters. ... The result is a frustrating weightlessness to the ups and downs of Frances and Nick’s entanglement, which is supposed to be overwhelming and potentially life-altering because of her youth and his unique vulnerabilities. But it’s mostly just a snooze.

“Conversations With Friends” is beautifully made, and the acting is fine, particularly by Lane, who delivers some of the electricity that is missing overall. But there’s not enough going on to justify all the time spent. Theirs are not conversations I’m inclined to eavesdrop on.