Conversations With Friends review – TV so slow it must be trolling us

‘Someone cast her in a play where something happens’ … newcomer Alison Oliver, left, with Sasha Lane in Conversations With Friends. Photograph: Enda Bowe/BBC/Element Pictures

There is a moment a few episodes into Conversations With Friends (BBC Three), the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, when it seems as if the makers are deliberately trolling viewers. One of the characters is an actor and is asked what he’s doing at the moment. He’s starring in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – “It’s a proper play,” he says, “where stuff happens.” Conversations With Friends is almost aggressively the opposite. I like a mood piece as much as the next person, but to stretch one out across a dozen episodes is to test the boundaries of even the most willing soul.

After Normal People, it is hard to avoid the sense that the makers have found themselves paralysed by their own success