Normal People

Streamers who enjoy highly emotive drama with credible characters who you love even when, or perhaps because, they behave badly will love Hulu's sweetly endearing Normal People. We meet two Irish teens in the last year before going off to university. The brainy Marianne (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is icy and angry, and we discover why when we meet her mother and brother. The quietly bookish jock Connell (Paul Mescal) is eaten up with unaccountable insecurities that seem to lighten when he's with the irascible Marianne, who fancies him. His mother works for Marianne's and through that arrangement boy and girl become lovers in some of the most wonderfully tender scenes of intimacy I've seen on screen. But they're a secret, to avoid the "awkwardness" of his mates' ribbing. One can anticipate the inevitable clash, and the crisis is pure devastation, especially for Connell, who doesn't know how to own his feelings. The series, which covers a number of years of romantic entanglements for the pair, features brief episodes filled with insight and candor.