“One Day” and “Normal People”: Sad and Horny in the British Isles
With Netflix’s “One Day,” ill-fated coming-of-age romances in Britain and Ireland are becoming a genre of their own.
From beyond the grave, we’re off hiatus! Welcome back, and hope you enjoy. I tried to avoid spoilers but no promises.
When it was released in 2009, “500 Days of Summer” was marketed as a corrective to the golden age of rom-coms, a refreshing and realistic breath of fresh air to the cliched excesses of the preceding era. “This is not a love story,” the narrator proclaims at the start of the film. “It is a story about love.” Despite this, there are many moments of romance throughout the movie, and times where the viewer starts to hope, well, maybe this could have a happy ending. Maybe they’ll end up together. But of course, we’ve been told they won’t. That even if the ingredients for a winning relationship are there, sometimes they just don’t add up.
The new Netflix series “One Day” plays with the same tropes of ill-fated love, recounting the saga of Dexter and Emma and the years of will-they won’t-they that pass between them from the end of university in 1988 in Edinburgh into the mid-aughts near London, with stops in Italy, Greece, and Paris. The show is based on the 2011 movie of the same title, which is based in turn on a 2009 book by David Nichols. Unlike the film and movie, in the series our romantic protagonist, the studious and determined writer Emma Morley, played wonderfully by newcomer Ambika Mod, is of Indian descent, adding diversity to the cast. Her counterpart, Dexter, a directionless rich party boy, is played by Leo Woodall of “The White Lotus,” an actor so charming that even scenes with the character’s mother seem weirdly flirtatious. The format of the show introduces us to these characters on one day in 1988, when they meet at a graduation party, go home together, but wind up spending the night talking, and the next day together, rather than sleeping together. They decide to become friends instead, and they keep in touch, sharing a special bond. Each episode returns to them in a subsequent year, as they invariably flounder, experiment, and succeed, both together and apart, and the various roadblocks that keep them from getting together, as time goes by.
The format and scope of the show immediately brought to mind “Normal People,” a TV adaptation of Irish author Sally Rooney’s hit novel that came out in 2020. It also follows a young couple over years of their youth, and its format, characters, and style bear so much in common it feels likely that “One Day” was an open attempt to replicate its success. “Normal People” starts with its characters in high school and follows them through college, beginning when popular athletic Connell (Paul Mescal, who was once engaged to Phoebe Bridgers) begins a secret romantic relationship with his classmate Marianne, who is awkward and reviled by her classmates. (“The Cut” referred to the actress who plays her, Daisy Edgar-Jones, looking like a young Keira Knightley, as “too hot and too normal” for the show.) The two discover their shared love for books, ability to talk openly and honestly with each other, and out of control sexual chemistry, but things fall apart because Connell is too embarrassed to tell anyone about them. They don’t see each other for a while but then meet again in college, finding their roles are reversed as the working class Connell struggles to find his way among a cohort of wealthy, cultured students like Marianne. The dynamic wears on for 12 episodes, with the characters moving closer and apart at different intervals.
Both stories focus on romantic relationships, but are also coming-of-age stories in their own right. “Normal People” gets darker, and deeper, dealing with issues like abuse, depression, and suicide, and its characters’ flaws are more complex. “One Day” also tackles grief, but its portrayal sometimes feels one-note, and can get repetitive. For all the time we spend watching Dexter in various alcohol and drug-fueled downward spirals—echoing in some ways Dolly Alderton’s “Everything I Know About Love” and the Irish series “Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope”—we could be spending time learning more about Emma, who feels somewhat underdeveloped. Other than being from northern England and from a middle-class background, as is clear from her accent, we don’t learn anything about her family or meet them, while Dexter’s parents feature prominently in his story. It feels like a missed opportunity in particular to cast an actor of color in the role of Emma but not to expand on the ways that her identity shapes her, her position in the world, and her dynamic with Dexter, beyond one comment about the war in Iraq in a later episode.
However, a recent article in Brown Girl Magazine defended this portrayal, saying:
Mod’s role in “One Day” reminds us that South Asians and South Asian identity are not defined by their culture and the widespread stereotypes associated with it and hence, do not need to play roles that put them in boxes. Emma’s identity is brought up only once in the entire series, when Dexter questions why she didn’t sleep with him and asks whether it was because of a religious reason.
While this minute-long encounter may have gone over the heads of other viewers, South Asians like myself may be quick to remember it because it was the only time Emma mentioned she is half-Hindu on screen. While representation of one’s identity is important and matters, it was refreshing to see that for once a mainstream platform did not emphasize a person of color’s religious identity or cultural background as the basis of their entire role in a production.
I am all for seeing cultural identities highlighted on the main screen, but when that focus is all a character has, without any other development, it is exhausting.
While her casting was certainly refreshing, it did feel like Dex’s micro-aggressions and the parts of Em he didn’t understand due to their different racial and class backgrounds were not interrogated enough, particularly as they might have affected their overall relationship.
Class comes into play in both stories, but much more incisively in “Normal People,” very characteristic of its Marxist author Sally Rooney. Connell’s mother is Marianne’s family’s housekeeper, and his options in college are limited by his financial constraints. The two experience a major conflict when Connell is laid off from his restaurant job and forced to sublet the room he shares off campus during the summer. Marianne’s worldly, traveled, pretentious friends, and the culture in general at the university they attend, Trinity College Dublin, make Connell feel less-than and unprepared. At the same time, Marianne’s family is cold, unloving, and abusive, while Connell has a supportive single mom, (Sarah Greene, who you’ll also see in “Bad Sisters”) complicating the dynamics of power and privilege between the characters. In “One Day,” Emma acknowledges Dexter’s comparative wealth and privilege, in a way that verges on judgmental, but it never goes much beyond barbed banter in early episodes.
In the end, I’m left much more convinced of Connell and Marianne’s compatibility than Dex and Emma’s. While Connell and Marianne both love to read and support each other in their academic and personal pursuits, Dex shares none of Emma’s intellectualism or political awareness, and it is in fact another ex that leads her more towards her creative pursuits. Though the two do have chemistry, it’s not as electric as in the case of “Normal People,” though to be fair it is a much less smutty show in general. (Watch it alone with the volume turned down to 4, unless you are a much less neurotic person than me.) But I was frustrated from the get-go with “One Day,” as it sometimes seemed neither their chemistry nor their connection was strong enough to sustain 15+ years of will-they-or-won’t-they. This is one of the difficulties of adapting a book or movie into a television series, and I wondered at points why “One Day” warranted one after a movie adaptation barely a decade ago.
Both shows can be irritating in their own ways, with the drawn out, slow camera style that stretches the will-they-or-won’t-they to sometimes excruciating degree–each could have done with several fewer episodes, and in the case of “One Day,” better pacing. The roadblocks that keep the characters apart for months or years seem sometimes obvious or easily surmountable, though I commend both works for not making the characters keeping them apart seem like one-note villains. This may be a limitation of the genre, as Allison Herman wrote in The Ringer on “Normal People:”
Many love stories run into a similar problem: Their conflict feels manufactured, the heroes kept apart by an artificial barrier. If only the protagonists would talk to each other, the viewer finds themselves yelling at their TV, a single adult conversation could solve their made-up problem.
As a whole, “Normal People” is more convincing, and rings more true, going for a more realistic ending that fits the tone of the rest of the show. “One Day” on the other hand, while an engrossing watch, left me feeling emotionally manipulated by the end. Crying at the end of “Normal People” felt cathartic while the tears fell down my face absolutely against my will at the end of “One Day.”
It seems that with “One Day” added to the list, sad horny ill-fated British and Irish love stories are becoming a genre of their own. Sally Rooney’s “Conversations With Friends,” also adapted into a not-great series, fits into this category, along with season 2 of “Fleabag.” Who can forget the show’s final scene at the bus stop?
If you’re watching, remember to turn on subtitles to understand the variety of beautiful accents that make even the most banal pronouncements of love sound whimsical and alluring— and bring tissues.
What I’m Watching: I meant to write a zillion newsletter posts about things I watched over the last nine months, but in terms of teen/ YA shows the most memorable I could mention would be Netflix’s “School Spirits,” a dramedy that follows student Madison Nears after her disappearance, who finds herself reincarnated a ghost eternally damned to roam the halls of her high school, alongside ghosts from other eras who died in the school. A lot of people died at this school, I guess. But I loved it. It was creative, funny, weird, heartfelt, and captivating. And speaking of shocking endings, get ready for a cliffhanger that will make your jaw drop.