#Tully and kate netflix series#
#Tully and kate netflix tv#

And just as you get situated? Whoosh, buckle up, we're off to a different year. It inevitably takes time for your viewing mind to first remember the details of what's going on in that timeline and then reenter that narrative emotionally.

#Tully and kate netflix series#

But the series lacks momentum, in part because just as a story starts to become interesting, we jump from that decade to somewhere else. At a micro level, there's considerable wit in how the transitions are done, so that a cut from a scene in the '80s to a scene in 2003 will put the characters' earlier and later iterations in conversation with each other. It's not that this couldn't work it's just that it doesn't work. And it scrambles the stories not from episode to episode, but from scene to scene. While the book proceeds decade by decade through the friendship of these two characters, the series scrambles the sections of Tully and Kate's lives so that it's forever hopping between 1970s teenagers (played by Ali Skovbye as Tully and Roan Curtis as Kate), 1980s twentysomethings getting their start, and early-21st-century fortysomethings coping with midlife. Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke are frequently enjoying that feathered hair of the '80s in Firefly Lane. It's regrettable, then, that this high-profile entry that adapts a successful book by a successful writer doesn't make for satisfying television. Stories like Kate and Tully's are potentially deep and satisfying sources of meaning in real life - not the kind of meaning that comes from moonshot life events most people will never experience, but the kind that flames up from the apparently ordinary. Thus, this is a 'women's saga,' while the story of, say, a crime family that operates over generations on the violent and vengeful energy of a bunch of men, with women primarily appearing as sex objects or symbols of the dream of a serene life that is forever out of reach, would simply be called a 'saga.' Despite the fact that the best available information has indicated for years that women as a group buy and read far more fiction than men in most genres, whatever is about women at home and with friends and children and lovers is 'women's fiction,' rather than just. There are people who are suspicious of slick marketing and packaging of some of the elements that predominate in this story - female friendships, romantic intricacies, marriage and divorce, pregnancy and motherhood, and who have learned to bump books like this into a firmly unserious subcategory. They are there for each other in times good and bad, in loss and in table-dancing, in sharing their tales of both disastrous boyfriends and promising ones. There is a man named Johnny who is important to both of them, who winds up being Kate's husband.

#Tully and kate netflix tv#

Tully's life is more focused on her career (as a television talk-show host) Kate's life, although she is a TV producer, is more focused on domesticity (she ultimately has a teenage daughter). Much of the story, in broad strokes, is familiar: Tully is the rebellious and sparkling one with a past that is difficult in more visible and explicit ways Kate is the quieter and more cautious one with a past that is difficult in less obvious ways. Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke play Tully and Kate, two friends who spend decades supporting each other in Firefly Lane.Īs of this writing, as its Netflix adaptation is about to premiere, the 2008 Kristin Hannah novel Firefly Lane sits at #1 in the Amazon Kindle Store category called 'Women's Sagas.' And indeed, it is written and presented as a women's saga: the friendship of Kate and Tully, played as adults by Sarah Chalke and Katherine Heigl, as observed over several decades, beginning when they're teenagers and continuing into their forties (at least in these ten episodes).