When the most important friend in her life seems to have disappeared without a trace, Elena Greco, a now-elderly woman immersed in a house full of books, turns on her computer and starts writing the story of their friendship.
It's a performance that serves the notion of reflecting back on one's own history; young Elena may not be wise, exactly, but she's attuned to currents of pain ...
Through Seasons 2 and 3, the series moves them through adulthood — marriages, breakups, children, affairs, disappointments and rivalries — deftly weaving class politics and the political turmoil of 1960s and 1970s Italy as the two women’s lives separate and intersect like sine waves on a graph. “My Brilliant Friend” is based on the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, who is credited as a writer on the series, and it holds close to them in plot and narration.
