Connell’s mother cleans Marianne’s family’s house, which gives the two a chance to talk outside of the rigid social structure of school. In these small pockets of time, the two learn just how much they like and are attracted to one another and begin to have sex, keeping it a secret per Connell’s wishes. As you might imagine, this eventually blows up in Connell’s face and the two graduate high school and leave for college not speaking, with the shards of a relationship despite their mutual affection for one another.
As the two brightest students from their school, both Marianne and Connell end up at the prestigious Trinity College in Dublin, where it’s only a matter of time before they cross paths again, now in a new social context. In the privileged academic circle, Marianne is now considered the “normal” one. She is liked or at least admired by most, and has the space from but also the resources of her abusive family to thrive for the first time in her life, but doesn’t have the self-worth to be particularly discerning about whose “friendship” she should accept. Meanwhile, Connell is more obviously struggling. In addition to having to balance both school and the paid work required to afford to live and study in Dublin, he is surrounded by entitled college kids who talk all of the time yet say nothing. The two are different flavors of lonely… until they find each other again and again, in big and small ways.
There is an idea that external action is more exciting and marketable than internal action which, if you’ve ever read romance (or dived into the wonderful world of fanfiction, which resists attempts at commercialization but is massively popular), you know is not the case. A lot can happen within the complex scatter plot of emotions inside of all of us, and not enough of our prestige TV narratives embrace that potential. Too few screen projects, both adaptations and original works, value the complex representation of emotional interiority—perhaps because it is so hard to do on screen, and the cinematic language, a medium largely driven by men, has rarely valued it. Normal People lives in that mostly neglected space (see also: Skam or Skins) and is not unaware of the difficulties of translating this kind of story to the screen.
“In some ways, Normal People is a novel about the differences between the characters’ outer and inner selves, so we had to find new ways to dramatize those differences on screen,” Rooney, who wrote the first six episodes, said of the experience. (Lady Macbeth screenwriter and Succession Season 2 story editor Alice Birch wrote the bulk of the rest, with playwright/screenwriter Mark O’Rowe penning one.)
Rooney is a literary master at representing the space of things unsaid—in a conversation, in a relationship, in a life lived. It’s an impressive storytelling skillset in any medium and oh-so-specific, which makes translating it from prose to cinematic language a real challenge. The screen adaptation mostly does an impressive job, in terms of both the script and the direction, but there are some stumbles along the way.
