Conversations With Friends review: BBC Three adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel is dull and flat and lifeless

There are things an author can achieve in prose that aren’t easily replicated by a television adaptation. In Sally Rooney’s novel Conversations with Friends, asking for a glass of water can be prefaced with reams of self-doubt, hesitation and practised excuses, all part of an internal monologue that contradicts itself and argues back. In director Lenny Abrahamson’s television adaptation, the same request needs to convey that same level of meaning with an unmet glance and a tentative expression.

That isn’t to say one medium is superior to the other on some fundamental level – that oft-cited cliché “the book is always better” is only ever coincidentally true – but just to draw a distinction between them.  It’s equally true that there are some things that television can do that prose can’t. In the case of Conversations With Friends, though, it feels that the story lost something when translated away from prose, without gaining anything by virtue of being television.

Conversations with Friends is about Frances (Alison Oliver), Bobbi (Sasha Lane), Nick (Joe Alwyn) and Melissa (Jemima Kirke). Frances and Bobbi are students, best friends, and ex-girlfriends; Nick and Melissa are a decade older than them, wealthier, and married. They’re all creative types – Frances and Bobbi are spoken-word poets, Nick a slightly faded actor, Melissa a successful essayist with a new book on the way – and it’s this that draws them together in the first place. An early fascination between Frances and Nick soon gives way to a burgeoning affair, complicating Frances’ friendship with Bobbie and straining Nick’s marriage to Melissa.

The affair doesn’t exactly break new narrative ground, and even someone with fairly little familiarity with the story could guess its major turning points and tensions with ease. What matters is the voice it’s told in, the details that inform it and make it distinct – or, at least, that’s what should matter. Stripping out that narrative voice to translate the show to television blunts that specificity, leaving this adaptation of a novel, which in some ways is more ambitious than Normal People, feeling decidedly generic and bland.