'My Brilliant Friend' Season 2 will draw the girls further apart as Elena uses education to leave neighborhood
While Season 1 adapted the first book in the Neapolitan Novels series by Elena Ferrante, book 2 will anchor the next season. The TV show will adapt all four books in the series across four seasons of eight episodes each.
To catch you up on the story till now, here is a brief recap of the main plot points of Season 1. We start off with Elena (Elisabetta De Palo) receiving a call that her old friend, Lila, has gone missing. She sits down to write about their intertwined lives if not destinies. She begins when she first met her "brilliant friend" back in the day in the 1950s, when she was still living in a working-class neighborhood of Naples' Luzzati quarter in Italy.
Lila is described as a natural leader -- bright, mischievous, feral and rebellious. She is someone Elena admires but is also jealous of. She sees her first as a rival in school, someone smarter than her. Despite becoming each others' shadows, the underlying rivalry continues in their relationship -- starting from school but also their romantic prospects as they grow older.
Lila is the plain, scrawny-looking kid who turns into a beauty attracting admirers, while Elena who is traditionally pretty as a girl becomes a much plainer-looking teenager.
As a way to distinguish herself and stay ahead of Lila, Elena digs into her school work, determined to leave the neighborhood behind with her father paying for her studies. Lila has to drop out when Lila's parents refuse to pay for further education.
In the books as in the show, Elena becomes the constant backdrop to Lila's more drama-filled life except for when Elena goes to Ischia and does some living of her own -- not all of it pleasant.
But once she is back, she becomes the defacto chaperone and witness to Lila and Stefano Carracci’s relationship. Lila realizes she is compromising her own selfhood by being with Stefano, who also sees her as a commodity to be bought through favors to her and her family. But as a girl from a poor family, it is the only avenue she has to grasp at a better life.
Season 1 ends with Lila's wedding where she is betrayed by Stefano while Elena is sorting out her own emotional and sexual baggage as she navigates Antonio Cappuccio's attentions towards her and Nino Sarratore's (who she actually likes) petulant hostility.
The second season will see the destinies of the two women grow further apart as Elena uses education to get out of the neighborhood steeped in male violence and poverty that has trapped Lila and generations of women like her.
'My Brilliant Friend' will premiere on Monday, March 16 at 10/9c.