The two girls have nothing in common, but when Kate steps up for Tully after the new girl’s date with an older guy goes traumatically wrong, the neighbors become best friends for life. Kate is the “Hobbit"-loving dork hiding behind Coke bottle glasses, and Tully is the hot-stuff new girl who moves with her hippie mom into the house across the street from Kate. (Ben Lawson of “Designated Survivor” plays their rebellious producer with an easy, stubbled charm.) And before that, they were college roommates, with the ambitious Tully pursuing a career in journalism and the bookish Kate dreaming of being a novelist.īut in the beginning, Kate and Tully are eighth-graders on Firefly Lane.
But before that, Tully and Kate were young, 20-something journalists at a local TV station. In the present-day part of the story, Tully is the big-shot host of an “Oprah"-ish talk show, and Kate is an overwhelmed working mom trying to get her life and career back on track after a divorce. Set in Seattle, the show stars Katherine Heigl (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as the grown-up Tully and Sarah Chalke (“Scrubs”) as Kate. But just when you’re ready to write it off, “Firefly Lane” shows up on your porch at midnight with a bottle of wine and a long, confessional story to share, and you just have to let it in. It also makes so many questionable moves and regrettable decisions in its TV life, it’s tempting to cut the whole thing loose before you get sucked into its train-wreck vortex. Like Tully herself, “Firefly Lane” is a bit much.
Starting in the groovy ‘70s and careening through the bad-hair ‘80s and the power-suit ‘90s on its way to the early 2000s, the new series covers 30 years in the shared lives of two BFFs: the damaged but charismatic Tully Hart and the geeky, goodhearted Kate Mularkey. So it is with “Firefly Lane,” Netflix’s TV adaptation of Kristin Hannah’s bestselling novel about the life-sustaining powers of female friendship. Buckle up, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
So you take the bad with the good and accept the friendship for the nostalgia trip that it is. For better and worse, you are bonded now. They make you crazy with their weird quirks and the mistakes you can always see coming, but you have invested too much time and emotional energy to quit them entirely. You know how it is with some old friends.