My Brilliant Friend Moves Back to Naples

Look at them! Photo: Eduardo Castaldo

It’s time to say ciao once more to the most magnetically sad Italians on television. My Brilliant Friend, the criminally underwatched Elena Ferrante adaptation from HBO, returns on September 9 for its fourth and final season. Based on the Neapolitan Quartet’s The Story of the Lost Child, the upcoming ten-episode season will be directed by Laura Bispuri and feature an aged-up cast. The enchanting Alba Rohrwacher (La Chimera) — who has been narrating the show since season one in voice-over — is the third and final actress to incarnate Elena Greco, a.k.a. Lenù, an upwardly mobile author who, after leaving behind the poverty of her youth, pursuing a dazzling education, marrying into an esteemed family in Milan, and having two young girls of her own, has just blown up her life for a man. While Lenù gallivants about Italy with Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni), the irresistible and unpredictable fuckboy whom she’s had a crush on since they were literal children, she struggles to square her minor celebrity as a feminist writer with her guilt over abandoning her family and ignores calls from Lila (Irene Maiorino).

Meanwhile, in their dusty, violent old neighborhood outside of Naples, Lila runs a tech business and continues to go out of her way to humiliate its former dons, the Solaras. But for all Lenù’s running and transforming, she can’t ultimately escape the place where she is from. “So you’ve finally made up your mind? Are you moving back to Naples?” Lila asks an overwhelmed Lenù at the end of the trailer, her smirk transmitting a simultaneous capacity for love and destruction.

The upcoming season brings the friends back together in Naples for the first time since childhood. Fans sad to bid arrivederci to Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, who turned in moving performances as the bambine from their teenage years through early to mid-adulthood, do not despair: Rohrwacher and Maiorino (who genuinely gives the impression of a Girace who stepped through a time machine) are every bit as spellbinding as your favorite competitive female friends, and much of the rest of the gigantic cast returns. Say good-bye to the summer that brought us frenemy reconciliation and remixes; we’re driving straight into fraught-friendship fall.