🧵 Thursday Thread: What are we watching now?

I just watched a series with the best, most beautiful sex scenes I've maybe ever seen. What should I watch next? What's not to be missed? What are you loving?

We haven’t done a what-are-you-watching thread since January, and I am here for it!!

I’ll go first. I’m very late to the party, but Jon and I recently finished the series Normal People, based on Sally Rooney’s novel by the same name.

The novel, I listened to on audible last year while I was driving the 4-hour round trip route to and from Moose Lake Prison to teach The Art of the Scene to my advanced fiction writers there.

I very much enjoyed the novel. For those of you who studied “flat writing” with me, this novel is a wonderful example of that style (as is, I believe, most of Rooney’s writing, though I’ve only read Normal People). The story held my attention on those dark, rainy drives during which I was sometimes so tired I had to roll down the windows, pinch my cheeks, slap my thighs, anything I could do to keep from getting to near to sleep.

Sally Rooney is 34 years old and was 27 when she wrote Normal People, and the plot follows the friends/lovers Marianne and Connell from their senior year in high school through their college years during which they cycle through periods of love and passion and separation. So it’s youthful, but still emotionally rich and mature, a fully developed story about wholly formed characters.

So, again, I like the novel—it held my attention—but it didn’t become one of those books I could not stop thinking about, one of those books whose characters just wouldn’t let me go.

The TV series on the other hand? Absolutely blew me away. It follows Rooney’s story very closely and faithfully, but the chemistry between Connell (Paul Mescal) and Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones). When I say chemistry, I don’t mean solely sexual chemistry, although that’s just incredible in this series. But I also mean just chemistry—the interactions between these two feel authentic, convincing, and full of genuine affection, care, love, and intensity.

Watching the ways in which the two navigated their mutual but separate feelings of disconnection in their worlds, and experiencing the ways in which minor misunderstandings blossomed into major heartbreaks between them, kept me holding my breath even though I already knew what would happen.

Beautiful storytelling and acting; highly recommend! Jon and I found this love story and its visual depiction so beautiful that—after I read everything I could find about its filming and the artistic and directorial vision that went into it— we started it over when we finished it.

I don’t think we’ve ever done that before.

So, what about all of you? are you watching now?! Or what did you watch recently? Or what can’t you wait to watch? And what do we all need to be watching with you?!

Movies, TV series, one-off shows, documentaries, etc., old and new, what’s been giving you entertainment, solace, and new things to think about—including the many modes of visual storytelling—lately?

I love your recommendations and can’t wait to hear them.

Love,

Jeannine

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