On their honeymoon in the picturesque Amalfi Coast, Lila discovers that she has married a terrifying Bluebeard, with no bottom to his depravity.

My Brilliant Friend ‘s marvelous, harrowing sophomore season begins with a fairy-tale air. That means, in part, fighting for a place for young women amid those gangsters and would-be revolutionaries, whose squabbles (and beatings) once seemed so far away. Spanning about five years, from the night of Lila’s wedding to Elena’s college graduation and first taste of professional success, the eight-part season finds the two young women navigating their way through their dusty, impoverished neighborhood, both striving for a kind of life neither their parents would dream of. The vicious feuds between the neighborhood’s rival mobsters, as well as the lingering post-war hostility between the Communists and the fascists, were important world-building, but also overshadowed Elena and Lila’s comparatively uneventful girlhoods while being seldom compelling enough as their own storylines.īut with season two, subtitled The Story of a New Name, the series transitions fully from anthropology to fiction. Its central tale of two girl friends, whose relationship was marked by obstinate loyalty to and ineradicable competition with one another, was often obscured by the TV drama’s focus on male violence - against wives, children, but most of all each other.

At least from the perspective of 21st-century America, My Brilliant Friend‘s debut season also felt like something of an ethnography.

My brilliant friend book review