It’s fitting that a dear friend from college introduced me to Meg Wolitzer’s novel “The Interestings,” the saga of a group of friends who meet at Spirit in the Woods, a summer arts camp, and stay together in various complex configurations for the rest of their lives.
“The Interestings” has become one of the books I return to over and over again, both for comfort and for reflection on the way relationships change over the years, and the ways in which they do and don’t survive.
So I was almost outrageously excited when I heard that Amazon was adapting “The Interestings” as a television series, especially given the casting: Lauren Ambrose was tapped to play Jules Jacobson, an aspiring actress who ends up becoming a social worker; Jessica Par? followed up her time on “Mad Men” as Ash Wolf, Jules’ best friend and as an adult, a feminist theater director; and David Krumholtz was cast as Ethan Figman, the member of the group with the earliest and most obvious talent who goes on to create “Figland,” a television show that bears more than a passing resemblance to “The Simpsons.”
So I regret to say that the pilot for “The Interestings,” which Amazon put online Friday along with “The Last Tycoon” as part of its efforts to test potential new shows, captures little of what made the original so compelling.
Sourness is part of the palate of Wolitzer’s novel, but it’s balanced by a core sweetness, a salty, smart sense of humor, and a dose of genuine bitterness and pain. But in Lynnie Green and Richard Levine’s adaptation, sourness predominates.
Rather than showing us a version of Jules who has been shaped over time by disappointment and diminished expectations, the show gives us a Jules who was never a particularly nice person in the first place. She’s cruel to her boyfriend-turned-husband Dennis (Gabriel Ebert), pokes her fingers in the wounds left by her friends’ career choices and even in one scene complains about her daughter.
Ethan, rather than being someone whose inner goodness overcomes his lack of outer beauty, is lightly mean to his wife, joking about auctioning her off for charity and telling her that he does certain goofy things because he knows they annoy her. Even Jules’ acting teacher, who is merely a tough and critical woman in the novel, is transformed here into a sexual harasser who makes Jules act out a humiliating shower scene, belittling her sense of her body and making insulting remarks about her cleanliness all the while.
Wolitzer’s novel works because Jules’ jealousy about her friends’ success damages things that are genuinely good and based in real tenderness and generosity: her marriage, her friendship with Ash, her relationship with Ethan. But Amazon’s version of “The Interestings” doesn’t land because it doesn’t actually make the case that these ties were real or strong in the first place.
