As soon as Connell asks for her forgiveness, Marianne drops everything so that she can be back with him. Of course, the plot is an emotionally stacked deck requiring practically every other person in her life to be worthless, making Connell look better if only by contrast. There’s a would-be wrenching scene where the camera lingers on his face—recalling the indelible close-up from “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”—as he blubbers to a therapist about his dead friend, whose loss would’ve hurt more had he been given any memorable scenes, aside from when he boastfully shared intimate pictures of his girlfriend at a dance. Mescal is most effective when his emotions spill out, calling to mind the crooked-mouthed vulnerability of Franz Rogowski, yet there is a blankness to him wherever Connell clings to his cloak of indifference. Travolta conveyed more with his fleeting expression of regret launched at a smirking Rizzo in “Grease” than Mescal ever does during this series.
The sole bright spot of “Normal People” is the performance by Edgar-Jones, which transcends the shortcomings of the material considerably with its complexity and nuance, though I grew increasingly tired of watching her character being physically and verbally abused by everyone from her monstrous family to her unseemly series of rebounds, including a cocky sadist whose mustache-twirling would give Billy Zane a run for his money. Most insufferable of all is her brother, Alan (Frank Blake), a one-note cesspit of self-pity who speaks to her as if he’s attempting to start a barroom brawl and deserves nothing less than a kick to the groin administered by Julia Garner’s “Ozark” heroine before being promptly tossed overboard. Warranting more screen time is Marianne’s enigmatic mother, Denise (Aislin McGuckin), who was herself a victim of abuse at the hands of her deceased husband, and has now helplessly submitted to that same dynamic with Alan. Had this family been put in therapy, we may have had something worth watching here.
Instead, we are subjected to a low-stakes narrative numbering a mere 266 pages that is stretched past the breaking point. Episode One is the foreplay, with the hook essentially boiling down to, “Will they or won’t they?”, leading to the first of many much-publicized sex scenes, none of which are explicit nor are they all that groundbreaking in their realness. Yet the camera’s preference to hold on the actors’ faces does make these encounters all the more erotic, and there’s a lovely moment when they take a beat to explore each other’s bodies with their eyes for the first time, after laughing over Connell’s awkward attempt at removing Marianne’s bra. These sequences are a refreshingly raw alternative to the now laughable lovemaking found in such dated blockbusters as “Top Gun,” yet the series also has its fair share of heavy-handed metaphors (Connell backs up at a literal crossroads when he changes his mind) and on-the-nose lyrics embedded in the soundtrack (“Take Me Back to the Night We Met”). I also couldn’t understand why the characters repeatedly walked through the rain without an umbrella, other than to accentuate the melodrama.
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