Walsh Sisters Review – No fan of Marian Keyes would have expected a TV adaptation like this | television

AFans of Marian Keyes (and we’re a legion, as her 23 books and 30-year, multi-million-selling career attest) can give you a sentimental but sentimental account of why they love her (for the most part). Keyes captures life as it is truly lived. It is lived out as part of a family (Keyes is mercilessly attuned to the specific rhythms and attitudes of a big Irish Catholic character, but is adept at making them universally relevant). We live as part of a couple, part of an office, or part of a community (wanted or – if you are, for example, an addict, a woman receiving fertility treatment, or a victim of domestic violence – undesirable). Or as a sister, or a daughter, or a polished professional, or a hot mess (the latter two are by no means mutually exclusive).

In Keyes’ version, all of life’s highs are glossed over, and its lows are made bearable by the human ability to find the humor in everything. Her books—once dismissed as “chick novels” or “romcoms” or other snobbish labels people attach to novels written by women, largely for women, about largely female experiences (although I think we’re beginning to emerge from that boringly reductive era)—hold all of these elements in perfect balance.

They get, unfortunately, not fatally, but sadly, out of control in the first TV adaptation of her work, created by Stephanie Preysner and Keefe Chadwick. “The Walsh Sisters” is a combination of the main plots of the novels “Rachel’s Holiday” (published in 1997) and “Is There Anyone Out There?” (2006), part of Keyes’ beloved series about a large, loving, chaotic family of five daughters, their mother Mamie Walsh, and their father Jack – somewhere in the background but with a steady hand on the plow.

Rachel (Caroline Minton) is one of the middle sisters, and is ostensibly a party girl. The six-part series begins with her boyfriend Luke (Jay Duffy) calling an ambulance when he is unable to wake her the next morning from the night before. When she wakes up, she and her sister Anna (Louisa Harland, of Derry Girls and Renegade Nell) make fun of him for overreacting. But he sees what Anna doesn’t see and Rachel won’t — that his girlfriend’s appetite for forgetfulness is dangerously out of control. In a hasty and somewhat unconvincing way, she shows Anna the error of Rachel’s ways and comes to support the idea of ​​rehabilitation.

Anna is recently engaged to her somewhat new boyfriend Aidan (“Just another one of your ideas,” Rachel thinks; this seems to be off the books, as Anna is – for an Irish Catholic, a relatively free spirit, though there’s little sign of that here). The central tragedy of her book comes in the second episode, in a watered-down form, and the ensuing grief and guilt further complicate the relationship between the sisters.

Rounding out the group is the dutiful Maggie (Presner), who is trying for a child without success and without much emotional support from her husband, Jarv (Steven Mullan). Plus, there’s older sister Claire (Danielle Galligan), who’s technically a divorcee and single mother, though as volatile younger sister Helen (Mairiad Tyers) points out: “We’re all raising this baby.”

There is – perhaps unavoidable, given that the source material consists of a 400-page novel devoted to each sister in turn – a flatness to all the characters. But there’s also a twist, which throws off the whole dynamic and presents us with something completely different than any Keyes fan would have expected. The most obvious example is Mamie Walsh (Carrie Crawley), who, instead of being a cheerful, self-confident borderline narcissist who loves soaps, magazines, and Harrison Ford, and “wears the smile of a woman whose husband has been an animator for the past fifteen years,” is unfathomably transformed into a bitter shrew.

Turning Helen into the uptight teenager she is and focusing on the selfishness and depression of addiction, while adding Anna’s suffering, doesn’t help much. And it’s not just turning Daddy Walsh into a cash machine, which is a waste of his tenderly drawn character – and of Aidan Quinn, who plays him. But it is the loss of the “real” Mamie Walsh that strips “The Walsh Sisters” of the vital love and warmth that characterize Keyes’s creations, giving us instead something distinctly bleak. The portrayals of addiction and grief are very well done, but you find yourself wondering if Preysner and Chadwick should have gone all out and written something dramatic and a complete interrogation of the themes, abandoning the comedy that Keyes blends into it with such apparent ease.

On its own terms, and as a drama rather than a comedy-drama, it’s fine. Of course, the books will remain, and they are as smart, comforting and funny as you remember.