Television series
My Brilliant Friend
Adapted faithfully from Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels, this HBO/RAI series follows two girls from a poor, volatile Naples neighbourhood as their friendship stretches across decades — rivalry, love and dependence tangled together. Shot in Neapolitan dialect with mostly untrained actors, it's slow, textured, unglamorous television, more interested in who these women become than in plot. For patient viewers who love language and long memory.
If you liked this
The Lost Daughter2021
Ferrante again, filtered through Maggie Gyllenhaal's ferocious direction and Olivia Colman's performance — a mother confronting the parts of herself she resents, with the same unsparing honesty about female interior life.
But It's claustrophobic and deliberately unlikeable in places; none of the sweep or warmth of the Naples saga.
Gomorra: La Serie2014
Same city, same peeling stairwells and grinding poverty, but seen through organised crime instead of childhood — a brutal, unsentimental portrait of Naples as a place people are trapped by.
But It's violent and cold where My Brilliant Friend is tender; don't expect the emotional intimacy.
Big Little Lies2017
A different class and coastline entirely, but the same fascination with women who need each other and can't stand each other — friendship as a kind of low-grade warfare.
But Glossy, starry and American in a way that trades Ferrante's grit for soap-opera polish.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
Two Women1960no page yet
It's the postwar Italian poverty and survival that underwrites everything in the rione, shown by neorealist cinema decades before Ferrante wrote it into fiction — same country, same wounds, an earlier generation's telling.
Sophia Loren, ferocious, playing a mother dragging her daughter through the ruins of wartime Italy — the poverty and violence that shape Lila and Elena's neighbourhood, filmed a generation earlier by the movement that invented this kind of unflinching realism.
But Black and white, in Italian, and genuinely harrowing — this is not a comfortable watch.
More like this (8)
Normal People2020
Two people orbiting each other across years, never quite able to let go or fully commit — the same slow-burn intimacy and class friction, narrowed to a couple instead of a neighbourhood.
But It's a romance, not a friendship story, and much shorter — you'll want more world around them.
Little Women2019
Sisterhood instead of friendship, but the same interest in ambition, jealousy, and what happens to clever girls when the world hands them very few choices.
But Warmer and more hopeful than Ferrante's world — this one believes in happy endings a little more.
Call Me by Your Name2017
The same sun-baked Italian longing and the sense of a single summer reshaping a whole life, filmed with the same unhurried, sensory attention to place.
But It's romance, not rivalry, and wealthy Northern Italy is a world away from Lila and Elena's rione.
The Virgin Suicides2000
Told by narrators obsessed with girls they can never fully know, it shares that same hazy, retrospective ache of trying to understand someone from the outside.
But Dreamier and more stylised — this is myth-making, not the granular realism of Ferrante's neighbourhood.
Call the Midwife2012
A gentler, more optimistic postwar world, but the same interest in women's lives, poverty and community stitched together over years, with real historical texture.
But It's cosy where Ferrante is unsparing — comfort viewing rather than confrontation.
The Godfather Part II1974
The other great Italian saga of poverty, family and the slow calculus of ambition — proof this world has always made mythic drama out of who gets to leave and who stays.
But It's about men and power, not women and friendship; colder and more operatic in tone.
Single White Female1992
Lila and Elena's friendship runs on envy, imitation and merged identity; this thriller takes that same dynamic and pushes it, unashamedly, into psychological horror.
Two women's identities collapse into each other with genuinely unsettling force — a pulpy, glossy thriller that takes the same engine, a friendship indistinguishable from obsession, and cranks it into horror.
But It's trashy, dated, and entirely without the social or historical weight — pure genre pleasure, nothing more.
Persepolis2007
Both are told by an adult narrator reconstructing her own girlhood against a backdrop of political upheaval — Ferrante does it in prose and prestige TV, this does it in black-and-white animation.
An animated memoir of a girl growing up amid revolution, narrated by the adult she becomes looking back — the same structure of retrospective female narration trying to make sense of a turbulent childhood.
But Iran in the '80s is a world away from Naples, and animation might feel like a strange fit for this kind of story.
People
Cast
Writing
- Saverio CostanzoCreator
Production
- Ludovica RapisardaAssociate Producer
- Lucille CristaldiCo-Executive Producer
- Beata SaboovaCo-Producer
- Roberta TrovatoCo-Producer
- Domenico ProcacciExecutive Producer
- Elena RecchiaExecutive Producer
- Guido De LaurentiisExecutive Producer
- Jennifer SchuurExecutive Producer
- Lorenzo MieliExecutive Producer
- Mario GiananiExecutive Producer
- Paolo SorrentinoExecutive Producer
- Francesco NardellaProducer
- Laura PaolucciProducer
- Luigi MarinielloProducer
- Sara PoleseProducer
Recommended by
Boyhood, Pather Panchali, A Bronx Tale, Gomorra: La Serie, Heavenly Creatures, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?