The TV Series My Brilliant Friend: Screen-shaping Ferrante's Storytelling for a Wider Audience

From a Bestselling Novel to a TV Series

Adapting a much-loved novel for the screen can be very risky, but it has been a rather common practice for a long time. Nowadays, adaptations are flourishing in the framework of a more complex transmedia storytelling landscape, where "adaptation is the new entertainment norm, not the exception" (Hutcheon XXIII): a hallmark of the "convergence culture" (Jenkins VII) we live in. In this paper I examine the adaptation of Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels into the TV series My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale), broadcasted in 2018 and 2020. In particular, I focus on some of the direction choices about film genre, characters, narrative voice and setting, rhetoric, and aesthetic effects, and I'll consider their impact on an international and diverse audience.

My Brilliant Friend is not the first screen adaptation of Ferrante's books. Long before the "Ferrante Fever" phenomenon exploded, two of Ferrante's previous novels, Troubling Love (L'amore molesto, 1992) and The Days of Abandonment (I giorni dell'abbandono, 2002) had been turned into movies. The first one was directed by Mario Martone in 1995, with Ferrante contributing to the script, and was of a somewhat experimental character. Ten years later in 2005, Ferrante's second novel inspired a movie directed by Roberto Faenza, who displayed a more traditional filming approach. Both adaptations were aimed at Italian audiences. At the time Ferrante was not unknown, but she wasn't a popular author: she could count on a loyal, but rather small, readership. Moreover, transmedia multitexts resulting from contemporary works had yet to become the standard in Italian media production. These movies were nonetheless important in signalling that Ferrante's storytelling easily lent itself to audiovisual adaptation.

While the vividness and strategic employment of visual images (Milkova, "Visual Poetics" 159) of Ferrante's storytelling stimulate their transposition onto the screen, the choice of exact medium hinges on the type of book. Troubling Love and The Days of Abandonment are short novels: plot lines follow a single character's existential drama, with the narration covering a rather short temporal arc. Unsurprisingly, then, they were adapted into single films. The Neapolitan Novels, a kaleidoscopic and crowded saga spanning decades and displaying both fictional and historical events that captivated an impressive amount of readers, required a different approach to cinematic adaptation. The majestic, choral, and multi-plotted narrative structure of the Quartet appeared to be extremely well suited for a TV series, currently a more popular and experimental format than single movies. In this respect, the popularity of Ferrante's writing proved to be deeply rooted in our own times, not only expressing crucial issues of gender and class in a complex story world, but also lending itself to production forms that are potentially effective in reaching large audiences. It's worth adding that literature's alleged superiority over audiovisual adaptation, a conception that was strongly rooted into the past century hierarchy of the arts (Hutcheon), is now slowly fading. For two decades we have been experiencing the golden age of television, although it is fiercely debated whether quality TV series have replaced novels, or whether upscale TV series have positioned themselves on an equal degree of refinement and prestige.

As far as textual and production details are concerned, the Neapolitan Novels, however, display at least three features that perfectly fit the modular framework of television seriality. First, the chapter division of the book's narrative flow, which is carefully structured around cliffhangers and space shifts. Secondly, the four-volume comprehensive architecture of Elena and Lila's story, which could be straightforwardly transferred into a four-season schedule. And finally, the serial television delivery timeline, one season every year, mirrors the publishing strategy of the volumes, since the novels appeared one per year from 2011 to 2014 in the original edition and one year later in the English translation, as soon as the translation work started.

Thus, when in March 2017 the Italian press announced that the TV series My Brilliant Friend directed by Saverio Costanzo was soon...