The BBC’s adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People was one of the biggest successes in the corporation’s modern history. Within a week of its release it had been streamed 21.8 million times. By the end of the year it had been streamed 62.7 million times. In the space of a few weeks the show’s male lead, Paul Mescal, who played Connell Waldron, went from being an anonymous fan of the singer Phoebe Bridgers to being her boyfriend.
At this point it doesn’t really matter whether critics like a show or not, although, for the record, they did and used the sorts of phrases directors mutter to themselves in their daydreams: “a triumph in every way”; “gorgeous and melancholy”. Normal People also triggered what from certain angles appeared to be a worldwide psychosexual awakening as the melancholy love story and very long and detailed sex scenes drove locked-down citizens across the globe into frenzies of nostalgia and lust.
