If you’ve been following the adventures of the Walsh sisters since 1995’s “Watermelon,” then you’ll know that these are five sisters who have been through a lot together. There’s heartbreak, infidelity, addiction, struggles with fertility, grief, depression, and, to top it all off, their mother – affectionately known as Mammy Walsh – is blunt, over-involved, preening and hilariously unable to read the room. Marian Keyes has written seven novels featuring the five Walsh sisters to date, and so fans have been understandably excited and nervous about how their favourite larger-than-life Dublin family might translate to the screen since The Walsh Sisters was announced.
The show focuses predominately on the stories of Anna (Louisa Harland) and Rachel (Caroline Menton), overlapping the events of both “Rachel’s Holiday“ (published 1997) and “Anybody Out There?“ (published 2006). For anyone who still plans to read these novels, especially Anna’s story, I would recommend avoiding the show (and the rest of this review) until you have done so. While the novels allow the sisters to take their turns going through immense personal tragedies, The Walsh Sisters has coalesced Rachel’s drug addiction and hitting of rock bottom with the car accident that kills Anna’s fiancee, Aidan (Samuel Anderson). While Anna and Rachel are arguably closer to each other than any of the other sisters, Anna has been oblivious to the realities of Rachel’s drug abuse, until Rachel’s boyfriend, Luke (Jay Duffy), calls an ambulance when he cannot wake her in the show’s opening sequence. While Anna and Rachel both laugh this off as ridiculous, when Rachel ends up in hospital a few nights later needing to have her stomach pumped, Anna asks her to consider going to rehab.
Splitting the focus in such a way – as well as the challenges of adapting books which rely on heavy use of the internal monologue for television – required the show-runners to do away with the central plot device of Anna’s story too. While Anna in the book wakes up in Dublin after her accident with no clue how she got there, wondering why husband Aidan won’t call her back, the show’s iteration of Anna is newly engaged to Aidan – whom she has only known for a few months but is deeply in love with – and is in the hospital room with him when he dies. While she struggles to cope with the loss, the amnesia plot has been done away with, and instead replaced with a new minor mystery for Anna to grapple with while she simultaneously searches for someone to blame. She lands on Rachel, who she and Aidan were on the way to take to rehab when the accident occurred.
It is hard at first to picture Harland as anyone other than her Derry Girls character, Orla McCool, but she is completely different in this role; everything from her voice to her demeanour is altered. Her portrayal of Anna shows Harland has great range, with there being moments where she is partying right alongside Rachel and dressed up to the nines, moments where her corporate PR role selling cosmetics makes absolute sense (though in the books this is a job she does in New York), and moments where she is childlike with her hair unbrushed in an oversized tracksuit. Menton also shines as Rachel, who spends most of the show in varying stages of dishevelment, and manages to be both tough and powerfully vulnerable as viewers come to understand the roots of her addiction.
The other Walsh sisters are less convincing, though the final episode seems to have left the door open for future series, and I wonder if we will get to see different sides of them when their turn comes. Claire, in particular, is a bit of a misfit, with the events of “Watermelon” having taken place six years earlier and explained with a throwaway comment about the fact that her husband left her on the day their daughter was born. Claire, the eldest Walsh daughter, behaves like the youngest (and looks younger too, though this could be Danielle Galligan‘s vain and flighty interpretation of her). Conversely, Mairead Tyers is an unrecognisable version of Helen Walsh, though you can see the show-runners laying the groundwork to discuss Helen’s struggles with mental health. I think they have bigger plans for her than the private detective work she does in The Mystery of Mercy Close. Rounding out the fivesome is Maggie, played by Stephanie Preissner, who also wrote four out the six episodes. It’s tough to stand out when playing the character known for being the only sister who ‘doesn’t cause trouble,’ but Preissner does a good job at playing a woman who has spent her whole life holding things steady and never letting her sisters see her struggle. She plays well off Carrie Crowley‘s Mammy Walsh, who is a little bit more of a battle-axe than expected.
I had big expectations for this adaptation, knowing that the books are both heartbreakingly sad and laugh-out-loud funny, and while there are moments of both humour and pathos, I did find the overall effect of the show to be somewhat middling. Keyes’ brutally honest and often self-deprecating style has not translated to the ensemble cast format, meaning that many of the lighter moments come more from wry moments of recognition at the skewering of family dynamics. Curiously, while the hits kept on coming emotionally, my eyes stayed dry throughout the show – perhaps because I knew precisely what to expect.
The show reminded me of the love I have for these characters, and for Keyes’ writing. Her ability to write uplifting novels about people going through the darkest times in their lives proves exactly why so many people were excited about this adaptation. While the books absolutely deserved to be optioned, I don’t envy the team who wrote the show the task of trying to translate the magic of the books to the screen. It was a big ask, and I’m not sure they have quite hit the mark in that regard. Don’t get me wrong – the show is good if you take away the need to compare it to its source material, but the overwhelming popularity of the books might make that impossible for many viewers.
One thing was for certain, however, I wanted desperately to pick up another novel in the Walsh sisters series straight away. Here’s hoping Marian Keyes has more in the pipeline.
THREE STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
All episodes of The Walsh Sisters are now available to stream on Stan.
