Only in a few decades will historians be able to start evaluating with method and lucidity the impact that the last five years have had on the course of human history. A global pandemic, a new conflict in the heart of Europe, an action of extermination in the Middle East, the recovery of neo-fascisms and the spread of Tech-Oligarchic Democrats almost everywhere. In short: really a lot of things to process.

Who have dilated dramatically the perception of a five -year period crossed by a perennial sense of death, who left us all to swallow immersed in the idea of ​​the apocalypse. But if there is an antidote to be administered to get out of this mental check, he is in the act of cultural exercise. And on the cultural horizon that spread from 2020 onwards, few have been able to mark what we could already call ‘an era’ in the way Normal People did it. A series that has changed everything, and that from 11 April returns to clear on Raiplay.

Normal People has marked a new divism

Let’s talk to each other frankly: Normal People also made us swallow and sob. And not a little. Adapted starting from the homonymous novel of the Irish Sally Rooney, which also participates in the drafting of some of the 12 episodes, it arrived for the first time in the middle of the pandemic produced by the BBC and distributed on Hulu (in Italy at the time it was released on Starzplay). It is the heartfelt story of two souls that touch and remain intertwined to each other over the years, even when they separate or at least they would like to try to do it.

Connell is a modest family, the most popular of the school, an attractive and very desired athlete. Marianne is instead wealthy, unfriendly and brusque in the ways, kept at a distance by those around them. He is Paul Mescal, she is Daisy Edgar-Jones. Two of the most popular faces of their generation, respectively born in 1996 and 1998. And Normal People is the show that launched them in the stratosphere of the contemporary Star System, that is, a very commented divism on social media, bounced between a tiktok and a meme, yet discharged in the ways, modest, from famous for the door next door.

Edgar-Jones is emerging more recently, protagonist of films such as Twisters or Fresh. But Mesal is the new Hollywood Wonder Boy, already candidate for the Oscars for the magnificent Aftersun, as well as the protagonist of Il Gladiator II and winner of a Laurence Olivier Award for the interpretation of Stanley Kowalski in the theatrical representation of a tram called desire. His, however, is not only the birth of a new star (it is always exciting to assist, performance after performance, to the formation of a face that will mark the collective imagination for tomorrow to come), but also the cultivation of a new idea of ​​perceived masculinity. Solidarity, equal, reassuring.

A nascent cultural generation

The series directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald in this regard played a fundamental role, because she told Connell and Marianne exactly in the way she announces the title: like any two people. He dismantled so by the turbulence of a frastagly and never completely resolved love relationship, but in the way in which mine, yours, our relationship can be jagged.

The Irish countryside of Sligo county, which overlooks the grayers of the Atlantic Ocean, is a viaticum to a feeling of rooted melancholy, which takes root and does not give up even when the series moves away from those places where everything part, arriving in Dublin, between the Italian hills, in Sweden. A perfect scenario for the perfect cornerstone of a new cultural generation, between the Millennial sunset and the dawn of the Gen Z.

A generation of passage that discovered a new way of being in the world, resigned to the evidence of having to deal with the slag of ideologies unsuitable for the challenges of the future, and therefore eager to travel, go out and open up to the possibility of exploring new dimensions of human, intimate, identity relationships.

The Sally Rooney phenomenon

However, a generation also frustrated, impulse and often weakened by depression, a picture that is clear and widespread symptoms of the suffocating social and economic structures in which we live. And that Sally Rooney, an author born in 1991, has understood and put well on focus by placing her as a reflective carpet of her novels, which are as vital as clinical, and which with her literary work have made it an Araldo, an authoritative and recognizable voice around which to gather.

As well as, of reference, they elevated it to the phenomenon of costume. Just think of the files out of the trepidant bookcases awaiting to grab a copy of his latest book, interlude, or to the massive marketing campaign for the previous work, where you are, a beautiful world, which also raised some criticism because they are considered in contrast to the explicit Marxist ideas of the author.

Normal People today probably remains his best, most intense, most sincere book – as well as a bestseller of over a million copies sold. And Normal People, the series, remains the romantic fresco that in recent years has better traced the coordinates of love and anger between two individuals who channe down the multitude of souls of an troubled but not defeated present. A formula that Abrahamson tried to reply with Conversations with Friends in 2022, another show taken from the first book by Rooney, which however does not capture the same, unreachable, depth of Normal People.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1jquwxt3ce