My Brilliant Friend is getting a fourth season on HBO. It was announced today that the Italian language drama brought to viewers on behalf of HBO and Rai will be wrapping its storyline up with a fourth and final season. Pulling its plot from the Elena Ferrante best-selling novels of the same name, Season 4 will be an adaptation of Ferrante’s The Story Of The Lost Child.
My Brilliant Friend centers around Elena Greco and her best friend, Rafaella Cerullo. After meeting during their early years of primary school in 1950, the two develop an up and down friendship that carries them well into adulthood. Set in Naples, the duo experience it all together. From elementary school beginnings, to high school heartaches, engagements, babies, successes, and defeats all spanning over sixty years, the two are in it for the long haul. Engulfed in a dangerous, gritty city that is home to the Mafia, political unrest, and social movements, the girls' friendship ebbs and flows just as often as their surroundings.
If the new season follows the fourth book, it will tell the final chapters in Elena and Rafaella’s, or Lenù and Lila’s, friendship together. The fourth installment in Ferrante’s series picks up immediately after the third, showing a newly separated Elena now moving forward in a relationship with her longtime crush, Nino. Drama abounds when Elena, who has turned her back on both her ex and her children, discovers that Nino’s wife is pregnant. From here, the story really takes off, launching Elena into even more problematic situations and eventually linking back up to a storyline with Lila, but we don’t want to spoil it for you!
Making landfall in the United States on February 28, the third installment titled Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay has kept audiences hooked. Through riveting performances, stars Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace, who play Elena and Lila respectively, have woven a tale of the best friends during their adult lives in the 1970s. Through the eyes on Elena, viewers have followed the writer's upward climb as she now has a successful novel under her belt. Escaping the crime-filled streets of Naples, the young author has settled in Pisa in hopes of focusing on her career. Meanwhile, things are not so great for Lila. Leaving her husband behind, the young woman took her child and has been wearing herself thin as a factory worker in a horrendous environment. Back in contact, the two grapple with their different lives and the guilt that accompanies both.
While no release date has yet been set for the upcoming fourth season, stay tuned to Collider for more information surrounding the final chapter of My Brilliant Friend.
