‘Firefly Lane’ Review: A Show Guaranteed to Make You Miss Your BFF

Firefly Lane is a show for the softies. Hardly the cynical fare associated with the prestige era of TV, Firefly Lane wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a decade-spanning ode to the power of friendship chock full of emotional twists and heartbreaking moments. It’s also a powerful showcase for its leading ladies. Stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke (along with the actors playing the younger versions of their characters, Ali Skovbye and Roan Curtis) bring besties Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey to vivid life. Even if melodrama isn’t your thing, you have to bow down to these performances. Netflix Firefly Lane is irresistibly addictive, even for the hardest of hearts — even if it definitely falls into the predictable pitfalls of the genre.

Based on the bestselling novel by Kristin Hannah, Firefly Lane follows the friendship of effortlessly cool Tallulah “Tully” Hart (Katharine Heigl) and bookish, awkward Kate Mularkey (Sarah Chalke). The two meet by chance when a teenaged Tully (Ali Skovbye) moves across the street from nerdy, unpopular Kate (Roan Curtis) on Firefly Lane. Tully is the daughter of a drugged up flower child who calls herself “Cloud” (Beau Garrett), while Kate has grown up the beloved baby girl of a wholesome Irish Catholic family in suburban Seattle. Tully gets catcalled and invited to keggers; Kate likes feeding her pet horse carrots and getting lost in J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit. After a traumatic incident, the two strike up a friendship that quickly becomes something of a lifelong obsession.

Firefly Lane was created by Witches of East End, Eastwick, and Jack and Bobby alum Maggie Friedman, who takes Hannah’s chronologically-ordered novel and rearranges it so each episode flits between key decades for Kate and Tully. Scenes set in 1974 show us how the girls became such codependent best friends in the first place while sequences from the 1980s give us a glimpse of how the two drifted into separate tracts in adulthood. By 2003, Tully is the nationally famous host of a daytime talkshow and Kate is stumbling (like baby Bambi on ice) out of a decades-long marriage that’s ended in divorce. Nevertheless, the two remain each other’s biggest cheerleaders. Well, most of the time. Kate and Tully are not just each other’s soulmates, but stark reminders of what the other has always been lacking. Kate covets Tully’s effortless confidence while Tully yearns for the unconditional love Kate not only was raised with, but eagerly offers her.

For all its melodramatic This Is Us-inspired timeline-jumping fake-outs, the story Firefly Lane most reminded me of was Elena Ferrante’s masterpiece, My Brilliant Friend. Like the famous Lenu and Lila, Kate and Tully are seemingly mismatched pals whose intense friendship is a mix of parasitic encouragement and deep-rooted envy. However, unlike that Sicilian tale, the ambitious brunette of Firefly Lane pulls ahead of expectations and manages to live her dreams at steep emotional cost. The bespectacled blonde doesn’t blossom into a brilliant writer in her own right, but lives a life supporting other people’s dreams. Only the scenes set in 2003 offer us a peek at what Kate could be if she broke free from her preconceptions of herself and took what she wanted.

Like My Brilliant Friend, Firefly Lane delves into a dark undercurrent seething through some female friendships. There’s an unspoken tension between the magnetic attraction two souls can feel ask helpless girls and the secret ambitions each woman may have for her own future. At one point does the energy thrown into a ride-or-die friendship suck the potential out of one singular life?

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Selling us on this intense decades-spanning friendship are two pairs of fantastic performances from Heigl and Chalke and their “teen” selves, Skovbye and Curtis. Heigl has always had a knack for deconstructing seemingly perfect women, but here she has the enviable task of giving us a character who truly puts herself first, at all costs. As Tully, Heigl dons an armor of pure vanity that shields the deep panic and self-loathing propelling her character to the top. Chalke, on the other hand, harnesses her decades of comic acting to play Kate, a living eruption of pure vulnerability. Kate is arguably the smarter of the two, but acts according to her heart. Chalke gets to show Kate in both her most embarrassing moments as well as her most triumphant.

But it’s arguably the young Tully and Kate who will pull you into the world of Firefly Lane. While Heigl and Chalke help guide us through the ups and downs of the women Tully and Kate will become, it’s their younger selves that are likely to steal your heart. There’s something so pure about their friendship, still full of hope in the face of tragedy, that tugged at my soul. Besides being eerie matches for their older alter egos, Skovbye and Curtis are able to juggle their characters’ innocence with the traumatic events they must endure.

Firefly Lane is not subtle, sly, or subversive. It’s a literally retro tale set celebrating a pair of late boomers whose friendship butts against the tumult of the late 20th century. Still, for all its obvious turns and emotionally manipulative choices, you’ll be hard pressed to stop watching. The performances of the four actresses playing Tully and Kate are so spectacular you’ll be sucked in. More than that, you’ll miss your own best friend.

Firefly Lane premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, February 3.

Watch Firefly Lane on Netflix