Normal People (2020)

For anyone who read Sally Rooney's novel and assumed television would flatten it. Rooney co-wrote the adaptation herself, and its 12 half-hour episodes follow Marianne and Connell from school in a small Irish town to university in Dublin with the same attention to what goes unsaid. Paul Mescal and Daisy Edgar-Jones play long silences, misread texts and the gap between what people feel and what they manage to say. It is quiet, sad and intimate, with frank sex scenes. If the book left you wrecked, this will too.