It’s official: television has a new genre. Its features include leisurely half-hour episodes, plenty of literary chat, several scenes set in libraries, not much humour and lots of close-ups of the thoughtful faces of clever young Irish women. It would also have presented a serious dilemma for teenage boys growing up before the internet, in that there’s not a great deal of exciting incident but there is a reliably high quotient of sex.
The genre in question is, of course, the Sally Rooney adaptation – which, having laid the groundwork in 2020 with Normal People, has now cemented its new-genre status with Conversations with Friends.
Sure enough, the first episode opened on the library steps of Trinity College, Dublin, where two young women were discussing a poem that one of them had written. Shortly afterwards, their joint performance of it at an arts club impressed Melissa Baines who, somewhat unusually these days, has a lucrative career as an essayist.
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