Is Nick on ‘Conversation With Friends’ TV’s Most Boring Character?
Of all the conversations in Conversations With Friends—the number of which is ironically slight—there’s one that remains with me. It’s a text exchange, one that references an off-screen, in-person chat between our tortured central lovers. Older, married-man Nick (Joe Alwyn) sends self-described “complicated” college senior Frances (Alison Oliver) a song. It’s Joanna Newsom’s “Peach, Plum, Pear,” the iconic piece of early-aughts freak folk that soundtracked a thousand depressive girls’ adolescence. (I am undoubtedly one of them.)
Frances, herself a depressive girl in the throes of late adolescence, seems not to know the song. Nor can she stand it: As Newsom sings “I’m a sensitive bore,” Frances appears offended and immediately shuts off the song. At which point I, too, was offended—how dare you silence one of our greatest bards, who’s just trying to bring some much-needed color to this drab, emotionally bereft diegesis?
On second thought—and third, and fourth, and, oh god, I’ve thought about this show far too much since my daylong marathon of its interminable 12 episodes—Joanna, be free. “Sensitive bore” suits Conversations With Friends to a T. But “blue and unwell,” a lyric Frances never got around to hearing, works just as well. Especially by the series’ end, that’s exactly how I felt, when the show asked me to do something unthinkable: believe that Nick is anything but the blandest, least interesting, most forgettable character on TV right now.