Normal People

Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald's Normal People launched on BBC Three and Hulu in April 2020 and was nominated for the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Limited Series and Paul Mescal for Outstanding Lead Actor. The series consolidated Mescal, then twenty-four, as a major leading-man career, and Daisy Edgar-Jones as one of the most internationally significant new Irish-British actresses of her generation. Adapted by Sally Rooney (the author of the source novel) with Alice Birch from Rooney's 2018 novel of the same name.

The series follows Connell (Mescal) and Marianne (Edgar-Jones) (two young people from the same small Sligo town in the west of Ireland) across approximately five years of their lives, from their final year at the local secondary school through their undergraduate years at Trinity College Dublin and the early period of their post-university adult lives. The relationship between them, intimate and continuously complicated, anchors the entire twelve-episode series. Sarah Greene plays Connell's mother Lorraine; Aislín McGuckin plays Marianne's mother Denise.

The series operates simultaneously as adaptation of Rooney's distinctive prose register, contemporary Irish-young-adult document, and sustained study of how class differences continue to operate within Irish-Trinity-University environments. Suzie Lavelle's photography of Sligo coastal exteriors, Trinity College quadrangles and the central characters' bedrooms; Stephen Rennicks's score; and the central pairing's continuing chemistry combined into one of the most-cited prestige limited-series productions of 2020.