Some thoughts and feelings about the Netflix 'One Day' series ...
well, to start with, I'm a long-time sucker for a certain kind of slightly-indie time-jumping romance, from Before Sun... to Normal People to One Day. Every now and then there's a romance that gets the po-faced indie men involved and proclaiming it's serious art, which helps make it a big deal. Surprised there aren't more of them, really ...
Back in 2009, I used to see women on the tube reading One Day, and eventually must have had some indication that it would be acceptable for me, a manly man, to also read it on the tube, so bought it.
I liked it very much. It pushed various buttons, was neat, funny, and sufficiently well written that, in the end, it made the second most probable plot resolution feel like a thunderbolt of despair from the outer galaxy.
A couple of years later, there was the fascinatingly doomed film. Doomed, at Square One, by casting one of the most famous, talented film stars in the world ... but also by being a film, rather than a TV show, which it should obviously have been instead. The fact of the film being the dampest of squibs rather sedated One Day as a cultural phenomenon. David Nicholls wrote some more good, but not culturally phenomenal, books, there were other zeitgeist romances, the world got a lot worse.
Finally, a decade and a half later, it's a good time to get One Day right. Which they've done. 15 years since the book, 36 years since events of the book begin. Although my own graduation ball in a beautiful courtyard on a perfect summer's night at a Scottish university was 13 years later (almost a whole generation), I remember immediately feeling when starting the book, and this TV series, that this was my world, my age. Edinburgh. The steps, the flats. Tramping up Arthurs Seat. Crappy 90s TV, crappy 90s haircuts. Outer London, inner London, weddings in the country. Are You There Moriarty? Phone calls, letters, compilation tapes.
Maybe the TV series is better than the book. I'm not going to read the book again to confirm or deny. But there are new possibilities, new angles. The leads are both excellent, offering fresh perspectives and contexts for their characters. Leo Woodall, who I've never see before, passes through many just-different-enough variations on pretty-boy 90s haircut, looks almost like various 90s heartthrobs, but surpasses the book's (and especially the film's) main weakness by really making you care about him and understand what Emma sees in Dexter. Dexter's never been a great character before, but here, he somehow is. Ambika Mod is just killer. I wonder if Anne Hathaway will watch it and say to herself "ay oop, i fooked that oop ..."
In the film, Rafe Spall, as the stopgap loser boyfriend Ian, was so much funnier, more endearing, more memorable, than the two leads, you wish the whole film was about him. In the TV series, all the supporting cast are great, but don't get in the way. Jonny Weldon, who I'd only know before from twitter parodies of an out-of-work actor, does a lovely job in that role,
What else makes the TV series better than the book? Well, the music ... some of it is quite obvious, which is fine, some if it (e.g the use of Nick Drake and Karen Dalton) is arguably a little anachronistic, which is forgivable, and, towards the end, it hits notes of specificity I just wasn't expecting, which made me feel, as the modern parlance goes, "seen". The Wild Ones. On and On. Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying. Three tracks from Bewilderbeast at the turn of the century! Up With People! Lilac Wine. And Olympian by Gene, mentioned by name, at the start of the climactic 13th episode, the most "if you know you know" musical moment I've ever ... known.
Even in 2009, One Day was a nostalgic work, but I was unprepared for the piercing algia of the nost this time around.
No social media, no twitter, no facebook, nothing. There aren't even any e-mails sent in the whole series, I don't think. The introduction of mobiles is a feature of the story, of course, but that helps you cherish the absence of the rest. How much we've lost. There is no mention of the USA in the whole thing. There's a bit of American music, but only great American music. It made me feel so angry at myself. How did I get so consumed by US culture, by the US model of cultural criticism, by always looking west? The film is set in an era when Britain was large enough and Europe was close. God, I know I sound like a reactionary bore. I was as grateful as anyone for text messaging and e-mails saving me from awkward phone calls, But, yeah, we grew up and grew into adults in a very different age, and it's ok to miss it.
Anyway, what was One Day missing? A scene on the East Coast mainline.. Shorley Wall by Ooberman. One scene in Leeds. SFA. Hoopers Hooch. Caffreys. A day where they watch Neighbours and Home and Away twice each. But not much else.
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