Some of the boys from the old neighbourhood are now fascists. Lila’s brilliance remains fierce, though her situation is arduous, and she is picked up as a symbol of working-class women and their struggle by the communists in her orbit. Lila is the one who stayed, in Naples at least, though she remains estranged from her family, and works in a meat factory to support herself and her young son. It is clever to keep Lila out of the first episode, because it makes it more powerful when she comes back into the story in the second. Even a short scene of Lenù in a bookshop looks stunning, as does Lila walking across a factory floor, surrounded by strung-up animal carcasses. This series is set in the early 70s and it really is a good-looking drama, cinematic in its ambitions, again taking its visual cues from a particular period of film history (this season’s director, Daniele Luchetti, has said he was inspired by John Cassavetes and 70s US cinema).

My Brilliant Friend effortlessly balances impossible questions about love, family, shame and duty, and it does so with impeccable style. Lenù is trying to prove that she is a new person, at the same time as trying to work out what it is she wants to say, now that she has a voice with which to say it. In Milan, she must watch on as young academic men are lauded for their brilliance. Every single scene between Lenù and her mother is a mesmerising battle between cruelty and love. She has been educated out of her class and traditions, but family ties remain, and much of the first episode concerns how difficult this is for her.Īt home in Naples, she is called “superior” and told she has ideas above her station.

Success brings her a new life among professors and student activists, where opinions are discussed over expensive dinners and there is no obligation for her to marry her fiance, Pietro, a non-believer, in a church. The first episode is about Lenù, the one who left, and her rise to fame as a successful writer of what is rumoured to be a racy novel. Lifelong friends and rivals Lila and Elena, or Lenù, are now in their 20s, and their lives have moved away from the poor Naples neighbourhood where they grew up together. This third season adapts the third of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and, for those who luxuriated in its first two seasons, it remains as gorgeous and seductive as ever.

M y Brilliant Friend (Sky Atlantic) is the most beautiful drama on television, and, considering how consistently excellent it has been, it remains sorely underrated.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante