TV review: Tonnes of heart in The Bear and The Lying Life of Adults is absolutely brilliant

The lying life of adults is a powerful and singular portrait of Giovanna's transition from childhood to adolescence in the 1990s. 

Things are looking up. We just finished watching The Bear (Disney Plus), a high-octane comedy drama about life in the kitchen of a Chicago restaurant. It had tonnes of heart, good and bad, reminding me of The Sopranos.

Now we’re onto The Lying Lives of Adults (Netflix). This is a slower burn, watching the world through the eyes of 15-year-old Giovanna from the plush apartment she shares with her parents in 1990s Naples.

Nothing seems to be going on in the first episode, until you realise that everything is going on. Giovanna over-hears her father saying that she is starting to turn ugly, like his estranged sister Vittoria.

This hurts Giovanna and gives her a good reason to seek out her aunt. And so she leaves the stifling cocoon of her posh apartment and visits her aunt in the wrong part of town.

The aunt is funny and coarse and self-pitying, blaming her brother for wrecking her affair with a married neighbour. It’s an absolutely brilliant soap opera.

This is probably because it’s based on an Elena Ferrante novel, the writer of My Brilliant Friend. If you liked the Netflix drama based on that book, you’ll love this.

All the petty insecurities that make up a human being are on display here. Like The Bear, a lot of the action takes place in close-quarters, the apartment here instead of the kitchen in Chicago.

Giulia Ercolini as Ragazza Ceretta in episode 101 of La Vita Bugiarda Degli Adulti.

It’s the best mystery of all — the one where you can’t figure out whether so-and-so is a good person. Giovanna’s father seems nice one minute, creepy the next, the way he sneaks off to ‘work’ on a Saturday to meet his lover.

The mother is elsewhere, or wishes she was, ruefully looking out the window in her expensive nightgown.

The aunt, Vittoria, is hard to pin down, free from the buttoned-down life that her brother has chosen, but trapped by the resentment she feels for him. (Prince Harry would get a whiff of recognition here.) That resentment is the puzzle at the heart of the story. Giovanna’s father said he sabotaged Vittoria’s love affair because the guy, Enzo, wanted to get her hands on his flat.

Vittoria reckons her brother wanted the apartment for himself.

The world expands through Giovanna’s friends, daughters of a couple who socialise with her parents. She also lives another life in Vittoria’s part of town, short of refinement, long on fun and bad language.

The beauty of The Lying Life of Adults is that you are in it. I felt totally immersed after two episodes, as if I was in the apartment with Giovanna and the rest. It’s a big break from shows like White Lotus — engaging in their own way, but wafer thin in comparison to this and The Bear.

So ya, things are looking up for 2023. The only downside with The Lying Life of Adults is that they are making period pieces about the 1990s now, and that makes me feel really old. Give it a long enjoyable watch.