'One Day' Tells a Beautiful, Bittersweet Love Story

The new TV series One Day (Netflix, February 8), an adaptation of the novel by David Nicholls (which was also turned into a movie in 2011), assures us that we are in good hands from the very start. Creator Nicole Taylor near-immediately establishes an enveloping mood of gently swooning romance, flecked with melancholy. We keenly feel the gears of time turning as recent University of Edinburgh graduates Dexter (Leo Woodall) and Emma (Ambika Mod) meet, flirt, hook up, and embark on what will prove to be a years-long relationship, both platonic and not. The show is courting us, just as Dexter is Emma, and it proves impossible to resist. 

First blushes are easy. What’s trickier is sustaining that sense of giddy elation and heartsickness, yearning and caution, as a story spreads out across decades. The 2011 film, adapted by Lone Scherfig, elegantly captures those sensations through Rachel Portman’s invaluable score, but otherwise the film is frustratingly static and broad-strokes; it’s telling us about a great love without really showing it to us. (Do listen to that score, though.) Taylor, who wrote the winsome 2018 music drama Wild Rose, has more territory to develop in series format, and makes terrific use of that space. 

Following the book’s structure, each episode concerns the same day, July 15, across different years. We watch as Dexter, a posho who uses his good looks and charm to make his way in the London television world, and Emma, an aspiring writer from humbler beginnings, become complicated adults whose one constant is each other. Some episodes bring them together; others keep them apart. The elasticity of their bond—they fight, become estranged, reunite—is a neat representation of the undulations of all of life. There is never (or, there rarely is) some perfect narrative to follow, purpose and fate guiding people toward foregone conclusions. 

Instead there is wandering, there are mistakes, there are bold gambles on what the future might hold. One Day finely renders the sometimes aimless ramble of nascent adulthood, with both wonder and a rueful sigh. Taylor is careful to keep things subtle, human-sized. Not every July 15 is a seismic day, though some certainly are (this is, after all, a romantic drama, not a documentary). Conversation is credible, pitched in the language of real people that age. The heavier stuff—a romance gone sour, a long and grinding struggle with addiction—is deftly handled, with compassion and understatement. One Day is a graceful series, woozy and clear-eyed at once. 

That balance would be impossible to strike without the right actors, whom Taylor has luckily found. Mod, best known for the dark medical comedy This Is Going to Hurt, shrewdly calibrates Emma’s self-consciousness and her mettle. She’s a nerd from a different social station who is a bit flabbergasted that a handsome sophisticate like Dexter would be interested in her. But she’s also aware of her many assets, her intelligence and unassuming appeal. Emma is still very much in the process of discovering herself, a journey that Mod illustrates through nuanced evolutions in Emma’s bearing. She grows steadier, more forthright, while nonetheless hampered by a needling doubt. 

A sturdy adult life is more readily available to Dexter, given his family wealth and high-born comfort in the world. He seems to be coasting, though it gradually becomes clear that he is actually in free fall. Woodall, who broke out as a shifty hunk on the second season of The White Lotus, could play the obvious beats of Dexter’s haughtiness giving way to despair. Instead, he finds remarkable detail in the character, connecting to the lost and ailing person cowering behind the flash. One episode in particular, when Dexter returns home for a fraught visit with his parents, is a heartbreaking marvel. Woodall’s performance is among the most captivating that I’ve seen on television in some time. For all the difficult calculation of how sympathy must act as ballast to revulsion, Woodall never lets us see the work. He is present and reactive, natural yet vivid. It’s a real star turn, but not one that vainly upstages his screen partner. 

Watching Dexter and Emma fight and fall apart is as electric as watching them fall in love. The actors are in such fluid harmony with the writing and with one another that it’s hard not to get swept up in the idea that this is all really happening—or, rather, that it did happen in the twenty year span of the story, which begins in 1988. Mod and Woodall are aided tremendously by the summery aesthetics of the series, its gauzy photography (never too reliant on nostalgic kitsch) and lilting music. One Day is an expertly tailored show, one that makes quotidian matters seem grand and the big stuff feel tangible. 

The series is so good, in fact, that it accidentally reveals a flaw at the heart of book: its late-act melodrama is rendered wholly unnecessary. We have already felt such transporting pains and joys that we needn’t have the looming, declarative emotional instruction handed down by Nicholls. This plot point, which I won’t spoil here though it is plenty known, plays as garish over adornment on a show that is otherwise in such calm command of its scope, so effective at softly guiding us toward swells of bittersweet sentiment. That heavy hand, an unfortunately innate part of One Day, threatens to crush Taylor’s delicate and intimate interpretation. 

It doesn’t quite, though. One Day manages to survive this imposition and closes out on a staggeringly poignant note, a reveal of something from the past, from the beginning of all of this, previously withheld from the audience. Suddenly, the story is cast in a new hue, a different slant of happy-sad light. Ah, to be young. And then, to be everything else.