My Brilliant Friend

Saverio Costanzo's My Brilliant Friend (L'amica geniale) launched on HBO and RAI in November 2018 and won the Peabody Award alongside the TCA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Drama. The series ran for four seasons through 2024, adapting the entirety of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels tetralogy, one of the most internationally consequential European literary works of the early-twenty-first century, with sales of over fifteen million copies across more than fifty languages. The series consolidated HBO and RAI's prestige-co-production model.

The series follows the lifelong friendship between two girls (Elena (Lila) Greco and Lila (Raffaella) Cerullo) across more than six decades of their lives in a poor Neapolitan neighbourhood (the rione Luzzatti) and beyond. The first two seasons (covering Books One and Two of the tetralogy) follow the girls from their childhood in the late 1950s through their teenage years and early-adult life. Different generations of actresses play the two leads at different ages: Elisa Del Genio and Ludovica Nasti as the children, then Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace as the older girls.

The series's commitment to performing largely in actual Neapolitan dialect (with Italian subtitles for the broader Italian audience), to filming in the actual Neapolitan rione environments, and to the careful long-form unfolding of Ferrante's novels' patient narrative structure produced one of the most distinguished pieces of European prestige adaptation in recent television. The fourth and final season concluded the adaptation with continuing critical acclaim.