Suppose one is looking for a sickly sweet Christmas yarn in which teenagers pursue one another through a sightseer’s version of New York City. Netflix’s Dash & Lily, which fits that description to a T, is still not worth watching.
A young adult series based on novels by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn, Dash & Lily is the story of a correspondence that may or may not blossom into a romance. Dash (Austin Abrams) is browsing at the Strand bookstore when he happens upon a notebook containing a cryptic message. Lily (Midori Francis) is the notebook’s author and the kind of lonely-at-Christmas heroine on which holiday programming has long relied. Upon deciphering Lily’s literary clues, Dash inscribes a missive of his own, and the game is underway. Though the pair have yet to meet, they begin to pass the notebook back and forth, leading each other on a series of dares and exchanging increasingly intimate confessions about solitude, family, and the nature of the yuletide season.
To say that Dash & Lily owes a great deal to a certain Nora Ephron rom-com is both to state the obvious and to risk eliding the extent to which Netflix has bungled You’ve Got Mail’s winning formula. Like the 1998 crowd-pleaser starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Dash & Lily follows potential lovers who court anonymously while a brightly lit Manhattan unspools in the background. Unlike You’ve Got Mail, Netflix’s series features drones from the YA factory rather than two of the most talented screen artists of their generation. A veteran of The Walking Dead and Euphoria, Abrams is possessed of an interesting face but lacks the skill to give Dash the emotional range he needs. (That the actor slides endlessly into vocal fry doesn’t help matters. Breath support, young man.) While Francis is better as Lily, the Ocean’s 8 star gives a similarly monochromatic performance, struggling to imbue her character with anything more complicated than a saccharine naivete.
Undergirding Dash & Lily’s acting problems is a structural flaw that represents a far more significant departure from You’ve Got Mail’s example. In Ephron’s canny script, the Hanks and Ryan characters are not only acquaintances in their public lives but rivals, a situation that lends dramatic irony to their email relationship and creates a plot-driving source of tension. In Dash & Lily, meanwhile, the protagonists are strangers to one another and aren’t brought together until the antepenultimate episode. Never mind that physical chemistry between the two leads is thus rendered impossible. The absence of a shared, real-life story arc forces the writers to lean too heavily on a public-dares narrative that is tedious, unfunny, and so broadly written that it wouldn’t be out of place in a Gap commercial.
Perhaps the greatest defect in this season-spanning subplot is its tendency to dramatize only that which audiences have already been told, explicitly, in voice-over. For Dash, Christmas is “the most detestable time of the year”; thus, his charge is to steal Santa’s hat at the Macy’s on 34th Street. Lily is a loner who lives in fear of being thought peculiar. Consequently, she must take to the dance floor at an underground klezmer punk concert. (“Go get weird, Lily,” a mischievous Dash demands.) That these scenes often unfold in such familiar locations as Central Park and Grand Central Terminal merely underlines the show’s painful lack of nuance. The product of five credited screenwriters, Dash & Lily feels at times as if it has been penned by apparatchiks at the New York Division of Tourism.
Offenses of this sort might have been forgivable were it not for the series’s various crimes against verisimilitude. Chief among these is the flimsiness of its conceit, which depends on Lily’s journal being found by a teenage boy rather than a middle-aged pervert. But nearly as distracting is the show’s woke insistence on filling its neighborhoods with so many gay people that human reproduction seems unlikely to persist. In large part, the latter choice is the result of an ideological arms race that has rendered much YA entertainment indigestible in recent years. (If 2019’s hits had one or two gay characters, Dash & Lily must have five, with a gaggle of drag queens trailing behind.) The trouble is not only the inherent dreariness of didactic art. At a certain point, the world we’re being shown simply ceases to feel authentic.
Whether teenagers will enjoy Dash & Lily is, of course, a different matter. And no one should assume that a critic with the tastes and politics of an elderly Victorian can speak for everyone. Nevertheless, as Netflix’s series marched to its inevitable conclusion, I found myself wondering whom, exactly, it was designed to entice. Today’s adolescents may be screen-addicted, overstimulated, and easily triggered. They may wish, after so difficult a year, to let their guards down for a change. But surely, they can recognize humbug when they see it.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
