IndieWire by Amanda Whiting

Engrossing. ... The series, like Ferrante’s book, offers a vivid, close treatment of female friendship. The relationship between Lenù and Lila remains constant in its inconstancy, sustained by jealous curiosity alongside affection. This season, it’s the interactions between Lenù and her mother Immacolata (Annarita Vitolo) that struck me as new and edifying.

Washington Post by Inkoo Kang

The still-stellar new season isn’t quite as urgent or consummate as its predecessor, but a turn toward the existential feels absolutely right as the women compare and critique each other’s half-complete journeys toward liberation.

Wall Street Journal by Dorothy Rabinowitz

This masterwork from HBO isn’t the sort whose powers depend on the suspense of plot turns. Every chapter is a profoundly moving world unto itself--a stunning achievement whose every moment lives in all the ways that matter in drama.

New York Magazine (Vulture) by Matt Zoller Seitz

The casting is exceptional. Every face and body is credible as one that might actually have lived in that period. The performances are alert and sensitive without seeming studied. ... This is a late-breaking candidate for show of the year, a drama about the place where aspiration and reality intersect.

CNN by Brian Lowry

HBO has enjoyed a good deal of success with its limited series, many of them driven by high-profile stars, a la "Big Little Lies." Here, the book is the centerpiece, and the setting and performances make it possible to escape almost entirely into the sometimes aching, sometimes stirring, almost invariably beautiful world of My Brilliant Friend.

Boston Herald by Mark A. Perigard

My Brilliant Friend is presented in Italian with subtitles. Don’t let that scare you off. Take the journey. Amid the brutality, an intimacy and honesty unlike any other flourishes.

IndieWire by Ryan Lattanzio

A gorgeously wrought second season that vividly recreates 1950s postwar Naples, and the complex relationships among its denizens, all of whom are looking for something more among the ruins.

Wall Street Journal by Nancy DeWolf Smith

"My Brilliant Friend" has returned for a second season more affecting, in an alarming way, than the first, though in every way just as impressive in its penetrating portraiture of Elena (Margherita Mazzucco) and Lila (Gaia Girace), the friends at the center of this tale set in 1950s Naples, based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

The Guardian by Rebecca Nicholson

My Brilliant Friend is absorbing, gripping television that demands that you sink into it completely, closing off all distractions.