A well-produced and faithful adaption with a major flaw: Paul Mescal is badly miscast and misdirected as Connell.

If you were to meet someone as good-looking and physically imposing as Connell at a party and they stammered and cringed as he does, you would think they were severely emotionally dysfunctional. It would be shockingly unusual. And with that Normal People goes from being a universal story of youthful love to the story of one young man's crippling social anxiety and the devastating effect that has on him and those around him.

Frustratingly Marianne is played as being blind to this (along with the countless people who have lauded the series!). One of the turning points in the series is Connell's refusal to ask if he can stay with Marianne, his girlfriend, over the summer instead of being forced back to his rural hometown to work. Rather than sensing his patent insecurity that he has displayed throughout their relationship and doing what any girlfriend with a huge house to themselves would do, she takes offence, interpreting his feigned casualness at the development as indifference to their relationship. The book skilfully portrays this as somehow agonisingly inevitable. In the series it's a childish, inexplicable misunderstanding.

There's another flaw with this portrayal of Connell. We are told repeatedly that he is exceedingly intelligent. '600 points' and a competitive academic scholarship at Ireland's most prestigious university. But it's simply inconceivable that someone exceptionally talented in an arts discipline would be incapable to the point of disability of gathering and expressing his thoughts - it is precisely this skill that arts subjects develop and reward. Add to this that he is apparently also a gifted creative writer, which demands a certain emotional acuity.

This is significant because the defining stylistic feature of the series is the lingering close-up shot of the protagonists' faces, forcing their unspoken thoughts on the viewer. It works well, but in the case of Connell we aren't given reason to think that he is someone who if only we could have access to his thoughts we'd see a rich internal dialogue. When he's staring at a painting in the Italian gallery, all I imagine is, 'Erm..yeah..well, it's..erm..a nice painting..erm..with nice colours, I guess, and..erm..yeah...' If you want me to imagine an intelligent, incisive thought process you've got to show me occasionally that he's capable of that in speech.

Alongside my criticism of Connell, an over-earnestness pervades the series. The realism is so heightened that it undoes itself by becoming affected. Connell and Marianne are boring people. Their extended conversations are utterly tedious. The sex scenes are as prim as a Victorian novel, which the nudity does it's best to conceal.

There is much to like in the series, but when it has received such unanimous adulation, my attention is drawn to what I see as glaring flaws.

A few more thoughts that don't have much bearing on the series.

Daisy Edgar Jones's Irish accent is superb but her 'soft t' (the characteristically Irish pronunciation of the letter t at the end of a word) is way overdone for someone who isn't your granny. As well, opposite a mumbling Connell, her drama school enunciation is jarring and robotic.

Jamie is a painfully one-dimensional character. He exists only as a villain (and a feeble one considering he is so slight next to Paul Mescal). Several times Marianne shows questionable judgement - she abandons her friends to care for Connell on the night they've gathered to celebrate her scholarship; she goes on a solo cycle with Connell in Italy leaving her boyfriend upstairs sleeping - but because Jamie is so unremittingly obnoxious it generates no moral qualms.

Marianne's family has three houses, the most modest of which is somehow her family home. In the book Marianne's family is the type of rich that a poor student at the same rural school can feel inferior to. But anyone who has a three-storey town house and a villa mansion in Italy as their second and third homes is the type of rich that elevates them so far beyond everyone else in the rural town that it's no longer a meaningful inferiority. This has the effect of undercutting the central dynamic of Sally Rooney's avowedly socialist novel.