Normal People, both as novel and TV show, lays bare not simply the thrill of first love, of finding someone who actually sees you, but, more interestingly, how the way in which others see you can affect the way you act. It’s passionate but awkward and sometimes ugly and, above all, feels true. When Marianne and Connell have sex, it isn’t glamorous or even particularly romantic. By keeping the camera tight on the two of them, he allows us to see every emotion, perfectly capturing the intensity of youthful love. Instead it’s a masterstroke with the shorter half-hour format producing an intimacy that, almost counter-intuitively, allows the audience to feel that they really know these characters.Ībrahamson shoots with a lovely loose naturalism that allows you to imagine that you too are wandering the corridors of a secondary school in the town of Sligo on Ireland’s north-west coast, and later the lecture halls of Trinity College, Dublin, with Marianne and Connell. While Rooney’s tale packs a great deal of emotion into its slim pages, 12 episodes seemed like overload and I couldn’t help worrying that the story would be crushed under the weight of expectations.
When that decision was first made, I was among the sceptical.
And in part it’s because of the bold decision to split it into 12 half-hour episodes, rather than the more customary six hour-long ones. In part that’s down to the superb casting: both Daisy Edgar-Jones (Marianne) and Paul Mescal (Connell) look exactly as Rooney first imagined, with Mescal particularly good at capturing the easy-going popularity of a small-town sports hero who’s far brighter and more complicated than he lets on.
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