The girls are back. Lenù and Lila, the main characters of My Brilliant Friend, are returning to the screen for a fourth and final season. Based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, HBO’s television adaptation stays impressively faithful to the Italian author’s work. Ferrante, who remains under a pseudonym, personally chose Saverio Costanzo to direct and write the adaptation when the project began, in 2016. In their search for the perfect young actors to portray the protagonists in the first three seasons, the producers auditioned 9,000 Neopolitan children, ultimately casting Margherita Mazzucco as the intellectual Lenù and Gaia Girace as the renegade Lila. Season Four, directed entirely by Laura Bispuri, picks up the story in the violent political climate of 1980s Italy. Mazzucco and Girace have passed the torch to Alba Rohrwacher and Irene Maiorino in this beautiful, loving, and turbulent story of female friendship. —Jeanne Malle