Conversations with Friends

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton are back! Make sure you know how to stream every episode of Conversations with Friends free online without Hulu.

Make sure you know how to watch a Conversations with Friends live stream from where you are. For Conversations with Friends, you may wish to choose 'UK' for BBC iPlayer. Follow our guide to watch a free Conversations with Friends live stream from abroad with a VPN. If you like the idea of a millennial, Normal People-style take on Jane Austen's Emma, helmed by an Oscar-nominated director, Conversations with Friends is for you. You can use it to watch on your mobile, tablet, laptop, TV, games console and more. Conversations with Friends is free to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK. Away from UK this week?

Following the runaway success of his Normal People adaptation, Abrahamson has is taking on Sally Rooney's debut novel.

So the way it goes is impending doom, then the maelstrom of the shoot, which is just too busy to feel much other than just survival, and then a kind of a sense of relief when you realise it's okay. And then a pleasure if it goes well followed by a disappointment because you always feel in the end that it wasn't as good as it could be. And so if you have the right actor – like once Allison walks in and says hello, or just that odd kind of thing she does, where she slightly responds to what she just said in her face in a way that shows a kind of discomfort – amazing detail. If there's anything that this novel is doing that's really interesting – what I took from it anyway, and what we all tried to put into the show – was this idea that happiness is to be found in looking outwards, not inwards. And that would allow me to sort of relax for a while, but I was very worked up internally: very intense, very hard on myself, very naive, very self conscious, looking inwards most of the time. But in your life, I think, if you're lucky, the journey is from massive narcissism as a late teens, early twenties person, [then] out of that horrible, terrible narcissism that makes all your relationships a disaster into actually caring about other people and thinking about them and getting off your own case for a while. Nick and Frances’s scenes, they do different things in different parts of the show. And then at different times in the show they mean different things. But being much older, and having come from an Ireland that was very different, it was kind of exhilarating to read somebody who was writing about this new reality for young people in Ireland and just generally a cultural shift. Because I think people of my generation, while we now live in a much more liberal and open country, we grew up in one that wasn't. And so for me, it was kind of exhilarating to read characters for whom those issues of church or a conservative atmosphere just didn't figure. It's massively to do with finding hugely skilled actors, because the way Alison Oliver plays Frances, who is sort of at the epicentre of that crushing kind of self consciousness – confident that she's got something but also terrified to have that judged and angry with people for making her feel awkward and angry with herself or feeling [that way]. Just this terrible ball of anxiety and uncertainty that people can feel at that age. And it makes for the possibility in the adaptation of doing something very simple, very low key, very direct, but which hopefully has depth as well.”

Based on Rooney's debut novel, the series revolves around Francis (Alison Oliver), a college student who puts on a brave face despite knowing little about ...

In Conversations with Friends, the Hollywood myth of a clear-cut relationship is nothing more than that — a myth. This one is for the tangled relationships we all regret, the ones practically designed to cause endless anxiety. Every emotional beat is portrayed in such painstaking detail, you can feel the full weight of everything from Francis’ excitement to her creeping regret. It’s that lack of moral decision-making that makes Conversations with Friends feel the most tonally similar to Normal People. Throughout the course of the series, Francis does many questionable things. Characters preach about being sexually open until they have to grapple with the reality of that label. When it comes to the types of relationships we now look back on in shame, Conversations with Friends is honest.

Hulu premieres "Conversations With Friends," another complicated Sally Rooney romance with considerably less heat (and momentum) than "Normal People."

The result is a frustrating weightlessness to the ups and downs of Frances and Nick’s entanglement, which is supposed to be overwhelming and potentially life-altering because of her youth and his unique vulnerabilities. Despite a postcard-ready trip to Croatia — where, again, Frances and Nick are so awful in their betrayal of the generous Melissa that it’s hard to care about their relationship at all — the stakes feel small and the self-consciously tasteful tonal palette exasperatingly pallid. Much of the blame lies in the casting. It feels like Lane and Kirke were hired for their charisma, then denied any opportunity to use it lest they overpower the listless central romance. The simplicity of the plot gives away the disastrous overconfidence in stretching the story out to 12 half-hour chapters. On the page, Frances’s narration is taken up by her calculations about how open to be with Nick (not very), her musings about their age and class gaps and her faint-inducing pain from an undiagnosed chronic condition.