Normal People, a show about two attractive dummies who just cannot get out of their own way, is not going to have another season. This isn’t news so much as non-news, but then again, the show’s central relationship was really a non-relationship, and that was deemed worthy of twelve whole episodes on Hulu. So there!
According to showrunner Lenny Abrahamson, there’s no reason to think Connell and Marianne are going to be rekindling their messy, disjointed romance on screen again any time soon. Per Deadline,
We’ve talked about the possibility of how interesting it would be to check back in with them,” Abrahamson says, “but apart from just general musings and over a drink, no, there have been no concrete discussions about what it would be like. As Sally [Rooney] says, the book stops where it stops because it feels right.
Unable to just leave it at that, Abrahamson continues:
But, I have a sneaking thing in the back of my head that if everybody was willing, and if the stars aligned, I’d love to revisit them in five years and find out what happened, where they are. Is somebody a father or a mother? What relationships are they in that then get disrupted by their meeting again? But it would be really strange to pick that up eight weeks later with him traveling to New York, I think. There needs to be time.” He would want to let the actors truly age those years too. “You’d do it for real, you’d do it á la Before Sunset.”
Daisy Edgar-Jones, who plays Marianne, says she’s not really sure how the relationship would play out in a hypothetical second season, beyond that she hopes that “they do end up getting married and have loads of kids.” (NO.)
Paul Mescal, who plays Connell, has more feelings on the subject than Connell would ever have about anything:
“Connell, I believe, would potentially get married to somebody else,” he says. “It’ll destroy lots of people’s lives along the way, because ultimately they’re going to be drawn. But they will consciously resist the idea that they’re supposed to be together. It’ll be a long process of discovery until they finally find each other permanently, I think.” Then he adds, more emphatically, “I really need them to be together. If Sally ever decides to do the second book or second series, I need them to be together.”
I do like the idea of a Before Sunset situation in which they run into each other years later, with Marianne having recently been transferred to manage the Boots store where Connell works as a cashier. Sally Rooney, please look into this.