The wizardry of Keyes\u2019s writing is its tone: Febreze-fragrant, funny and comfortable, even as she steers you towards some of the more miserable parts of human experience. Her trick is the self-delusion of her narrators, who are usually charming Irish women up to their necks in denial about addiction, grief or despair. (\u201cThey said I was a drug addict\u2026 surely drug addicts were thinner?\u201d is how Rachel begins Rachel\u2019s Holiday). <\/p>\n
By the time the reader has cottoned on to just how serious these stories actually are, it\u2019s too late: we\u2019re locked in. But without the crutch of a voiceover, which The Walsh Sisters eschews, how do you translate that delicate tonal balance of flippant and fraught to the screen? What sort of job does the show do at capturing Keyes\u2019s peculiar charm? <\/p>\n
A pretty good one, is my irritatingly vanilla answer (I can just imagine a Walsh sister eye-roll: \u201cIs that a boring thing to say or what?\u201d). The show takes a minute to warm up \u2014 I didn\u2019t much like the first episode, but cheered up during the second and third \u2014 and a couple of the adaptation decisions are a bit baffling. Why, for instance, have the writers turned Mammy Walsh, played by Carrie Crowley, from a self-involved but loveable figure into a cartoon ice-monster? And why have they collapsed the transatlantic geography of the books \u2014 in which Rachel starts out as a party girl in New York \u2014 down to just Dublin, which strains the credulity of a key premise: that Rachel has become a depressed drug addict without anyone noticing? If it was a cost-saving choice, it was not a smart one. But put these niggles aside and it\u2019s a very sweet watch.<\/p>\n
The show preserves Keyes\u2019s gift for sister-sister patter \u2014 an idiomatically Irish kind of brutality, undergirded by love. \u201cI have news,\u201d announces the about-to-be-divorced Claire (Danielle Galligan) at Sunday lunch. \u201cHas Black Friday come early?\u201d the stroppy youngest, Helen (M\u00e1ir\u00e9ad Tyers), deadpans back. We see drug-addled Rachel (Caroline Menton) and kind Anna (Louisa Harland) drunk in a bathroom one night, discussing their imminent conquests. \u201cDo I look OK?\u201d Rachel asks. A quick, appraising glance from Anna: \u201cYeah.\u201d \u201cYeah, but would you want to ride me?\u201d Another quick, appraising glance, and then a more forceful: \u201cYeah.\u201d Friends are for sweetness and support \u2014 sisters are for telling you the truth. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Read more TV reviews, guides about what to watch and interviews<\/a><\/p>\n It works because of the script (Keyes has a writing credit), but also the strong central performances from fairly new faces. Menton does a good job with the tricky task of conveying a character wobbling on the line between normal life and total self-destruction, but the stand-outs are Galligan (real warmth) and Harland, who is stiller and quieter than the others and seems to stockpile big reserves of emotion beneath all those red ringlets. The moment in the third episode when she receives some catastrophic news and immediately starts fussing about her Glastonbury ticket is viscerally upsetting. <\/p>\n Not a perfect adaptation but a pretty good one \u2014 and at least Keyes is finally on screen where she belongs. Actually, it\u2019s striking how much stand-out TV comedy and drama of the past half-decade has been about young Irish women: Derry Girls, Normal People, Bad Sisters\u2026 At this point they are pretty much powering Britain\u2019s cultural economy. <\/p>\n Paul McCartney is an executive producer of Man on the Run<\/p>\n Against my instincts as a good, eye-rolling, not-the-effing-Beatles-again Gen Zer, I fired up Amazon\u2019s Paul McCartney documentary Man on the Run, directed by Morgan Neville. I feel I have to start preparing myself, spiritually and intellectually, for The Beatles \u2014 A Four-Film Cinematic Event, as the Wikipedia page modestly calls it, Sam Mendes\u2019s flashy quartet of Fab Four biopics that somehow already has a release date, April 7, despite it being in 2028. <\/p>\n One person it\u2019s tempting to blame for the endless Beatles circus is McCartney, who has seemingly rarely tired of retelling his own myth and is an executive producer of this film about his post-Beatles band, Wings, as is now customary with streamer celebrity hagiographies (see also Netflix\u2019s Beckham and Amazon\u2019s Melania).<\/p>\n But Man on the Run is not quite the two-hour puff job I had expected. It\u2019s a surprisingly thoughtful, slightly melancholy portrait of a man wobbling at the end of a long adolescence, half wanting to stay young for ever, half desperate to grow up. McCartney was 27, my age, when the Beatles broke up, his life barely begun and yet somehow over. <\/p>\n \u201cHistorians may one day view this as a landmark in the decline of the British empire,\u201d explains an earnest young American reporter from 1969 in shirt and tie. McCartney\u2019s avuncular voiceover seems epochs away from the bristling, goofy young man bestriding his Scottish vegetable garden in the wonderfully intimate footage shot by Linda McCartney, much of it seen here for the first time. He is tugged in two directions.<\/p>\n On the one hand, newly married with young kids, he wants to burrow away on his Kintyre farm with his sheep and knitted jumpers<\/a>. But he\u2019s also addicted to the music, the writing and the road \u2014 the Beatles had barely broken up when he released his first solo album, McCartney, which was widely panned. And so, being not just anyone, but Paul McCartney, he comes up with a brilliant solution: instead of choosing between these two modes of living, he combines them. He turns the family life and the Scottish farm and the knitted sweaters into a band. <\/p>\n The music of Wings, which includes hits such as Silly Love Songs and Jet, has always been divisive (\u201cMonumentally irrelevant,\u201d said one critic), but what I realised while watching Man on the Run is that its cultural legacy had nothing to do with music. What Wings did was turn a family into a lifestyle brand. Today you can still see the influence of the wholesome, so-uncool-it\u2019s-cool bohemia peddled by Paul and particularly Linda everywhere: in Glastonbury, Cool Britannia, chunky knitwear, hipster beards and a kind of middle-class metropolitan yearning for the good life in the country. Disconcerting to realise: I\u2019ve been aping the Beatles.<\/p>\n Love TV? Discover the best shows on Netflix<\/a>, the best Prime Video TV shows<\/a>, the best Disney+ shows<\/a>, the best Apple TV+ shows<\/a>, the best shows on BBC iPlayer<\/a>, the best shows on Sky and Now<\/a>, the best shows on ITVX<\/a>, the best shows on Channel 4<\/a> streaming, the best shows on Paramount+<\/a> and our favourite hidden gem TV shows<\/a>. Don\u2019t forget to check our critics\u2019 choices to what to watch this week<\/a>, and browse our comprehensive TV guide<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You couldn\u2019t pay me to adapt a Marian Keyes novel for TV. Well, obviously you could \u2014 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313692,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[146,85,46,411],"class_list":["post-313691","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313691"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313691\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313691"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313691"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Paul](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/\/0bd2726a-4fcb-47f3-bfff-aeacef579f0e.jpg\")
<\/p>\n