Nothing about the glum opening of “My Brilliant Friend” (begins Sunday, 9 p.m., HBO), in which a woman in her 60s irritably receives a phone call about an old friend gone missing, prepares us for the extraordinary chapters to follow. This is just as well. The purity of the drama that follows has a shock all its own—a tide that powers its way through the entirety of the world encompassed in this saga based on Elena Ferrante’s novel set in 1950s Naples.
To adapt the novel for the screen, producers headed to southern Italy and enlisted Neapolitan-speaking actresses, an elaborate set and thousands of extras
The new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend” attempts above all to re-create the story as readers imagined it.
The screen version of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel, the first in her four-book Neapolitan series, will air on HBO in eight one-hour episodes starting Nov. 18. The story follows the complicated friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who meet at a Naples school in the 1950s.
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