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One Day review: justice for fans of the David Nicholls novel

Netflix's take on the blockbuster book hits you like a 'Tyson Fury left hook'

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Netflix's new production of the bestselling novel "One Day" by David Nicholls is "exquisite". 

That's the view of Carol Midgley in The Times and thankfully so, as the 2011 film version was "a dud", mainly because of "Anne Hathaway’s systematic massacre of the Yorkshire accent", which was not too dissimilar to Dick van Dyke’s attempt at Cockney in "Mary Poppins". 

'Will-they-won't-they friendship'

In the new 14-part drama, Ambika Mod, who played junior doctor Shruti in "This Is Going to Hurt", is "fabulous" as Em, with excellent deadpan comic timing. And Leo Woodall as Dexter is "glorious" too, building on his uncompromising turn in "The White Lotus".

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In "One Day", Em and Dexter meet on St Swithin's Day – 15 July – 1998 on their graduation day at the University of Edinburgh. The story revisits their will-they-won't-they friendship on the same day every year and this series is "like a charming flipbook with the highest production value you've ever seen", said Rebecca Cook in Digital Spy .

There are some failings that even Netflix couldn't fix, though. Dexter only seems to fall in love with Em once she's "taken off her glasses, straightened her hair and he's exhausted all other options", said Cook.

'A lovely nostalgia trip'

But it captures some beautiful seminal British moments: "a boozy graduation ball; a hazy summer evening spent drinking wine on London's Primrose Hill; a midnight heart-to-heart in the middle of a lamplit maze", said Neil Armstrong on the BBC . The soundtrack, including Massive Attack, Suede and Jeff Buckley, is a "lovely nostalgia trip", said Midgley, and it's a "delight to linger in this pre-social media, pre-2008, pre-Brexit world of eternal summer", said Cook. 

And in the London Evening Standard , Alexandra Jones concluded that the book probably isn't as good as we remember it. Still, she said, this "gorgeous, cleverer than most, rom-com" is the "perfect, sunny watch for gloomy February".

Get ready for the ending, which Midgley said will "put you through the wringer" like a "Tyson Fury left hook".

David Nicholls is appearing at the Stratford Literary Festival, which runs from 1 to 5 May at stratlitfest.co.uk . Readers of The Week will receive a special discount on festival tickets, simply use the code WKSLF24 when booking.

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“God, I love it when you guys fight. Ooh, trouble in paradise… I do! I mean, it just means you have a normal ordinary relationship.” The best friend Tilly (a delightful Amber Grappy ) says these lines in the penultimate episode of Netflix’s “ One Day .” She’s speaking to our heroine Emma Morley, played winningly by Ambika Mod . The sentiment reverberates because Emma and her love interest Dexter Mayhew (a perfectly cast Leo Woodall ) do not have a normal relationship. They have a storybook type of love, the thing of legend and weepy romances.

Based on the book by David Nicholls , Netflix’s serialized version of this hit follows our star-crossed lovers as they meet, collide, repel, and repeat through the years on the single day of July 15. It starts as they graduate college and ends, well, comparisons to “The Notebook” are apt.

But before they get together, Emma and Dex spend a lot of time growing up, becoming best friends who inspire each other to be better, as their mutual attraction simmers underneath. Here, the series format does an excellent job of making both our leads lived-in people, something the 2011 film starring Anne Hathaway and Jim Sturgess didn’t quite succeed in doing. Woodall’s “Sexy Dexy” is genuinely charming as the golden boy whose life is indeed too easy until it isn’t. It’s clear why some (including Emma) are so drawn to him while others are repelled.

Meanwhile, casting a woman of color as Emma further underlines the differences in the two’s social stations. She may graduate with the grades, but tough economic times are ahead for the aspiring writer looking for her voice. Mod inhabits her various transformations and compromises, lighting up when Dexter’s in the frame but not letting him define her either (until, perhaps, the very end).

Starting in 1988 and continuing for decades, “One Day” resists some of the pitfalls of pieces set in its period with costumes that feel true to the era but not distracting. The production also does a good job of aging its characters gently, taking them past their early twenties with subtle changes in their faces, styles, and mannerisms.

But where it really excels is telling this intense love story of improbable equals. Emma and Dexter are of different races, genders, social classes, and temperaments. But they find a way to meet each other on equal footing, despite society valuing one more than the other depending on the season. And the story construction mirrors that for most of the first 13 episodes, giving their interiority, their sexual adventures, and their relationships outside of each other, all equal weight. The result is a compelling portrayal of two people’s rocky pathway as they go from strangers to best friends to partners.

Fated as they are to get together, the episodic structure works well in plot development too, each installment a sort of sonnet to their phase of life. Yes, it can drag a bit in the middle when convention and personal development dictate that they must be apart. And yes, the musical cues can be overwrought, practically shouting what to feel at any given moment.

Overall, it works. They earn their eventual couplehood, having found their way to a beautiful and exceptional pairing.

Unfortunately—for lovers of love, happy endings, and dynamic female characters—that’s not where the story ends. Not in the 2009 book, the 2011 movie, or the 2024 series. This is a weeper and its tragedy feels clichéd after the characters have already been through so much. Indeed, the ending undermines so much of the charm and goodwill earned in its previous episodes, effectively turning Emma’s whole existence into a lesson in humility for Dexter. And that feels cheap and simple-minded, especially after spending so much time getting to know this pair through the years.

In the end, the lesson of “One Day” appears to be that love conquers all, except casual misogyny.

Whole series screened for review. On Netflix now.

Cristina Escobar

Cristina Escobar is the co-founder of LatinaMedia.Co, a digital publication uplifting Latina and gender non-conforming Latinx perspectives in media.

• Leo Woodall as Dexter
• Ambika Mod as Emma
• Amber Grappy as Tilly
• Brendan Quinn as Callum
• Jonny Weldon as Ian
• Essie Davis as Alison
• Nicole Taylor

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• What Is Cinema?

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.

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One Day review — exquisite adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel

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One Day Netflix ★★★★★

Were you ambivalent about the new adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel One Day ? I don’t blame you. The film version in 2011 was a dud, mainly because of Anne Hathaway’s systematic massacre of the Yorkshire accent, which drew comparisons to Dick Van Dyke’s attempt at Cockney in Mary Poppins , although to be fair it wasn’t quite that bad. I suspect nothing ever will be.

So Ambika Mod was on to a winner before she had even opened her mouth, because she couldn’t be worse than that. As it turns out, she is fabulous. Her Leeds accent is good, especially given that she grew up in Hertfordshire, and her deadpan comic timing is excellent. The other good news is that

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A narrator brings us along as she makes meaning from a traumatic childhood

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Book Review

By Nora Lange Two Dollar Radio: 340 pages, $18.95 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Bernie, the narrator of Nora Lange’s novel, “Us Fools,” grows up on a farm in central Illinois in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but Bernie isn’t as interested in portraying the farm or the landscape as she is in portraying her family, especially her older sister, Joanne, who is smart, rebellious and disabled. According to Bernie, she and Joanne come from a long line of women who had been hard to handle and have lived, in some ways, tragic lives. Lange’s style is complex and comedic, giving “Us Fools” an unusual feel — do I laugh, do I sigh, do I stick it out and try to comprehend what’s happening?

Novels written in the first person can seem a little self-obsessed, but Lange does a good job of investigating how Bernie tries to understand the complexity of her relatives and her relationship to each of them. She begins when Bernie is about to turn 9 and Joanne is 11. Their parents aren’t around, and Joanne decides “to jump from our roof,” which is about 25 feet above the concrete driveway. Bernie doesn’t stop her or run to find the parents. She thinks that Joanne has more to teach her than anyone else, and whatever Joanne wants to do, she can’t be stopped from doing it. Bernie knows already that anything that Joanne does will reveal something new and fascinating to her (maybe to Joanne, too) and she writes about looking at Joanne injured on the driveway: “I relished it, even if I pretended I didn’t.”

Bernie’s parents have plenty of problems to deal with. It’s the late 1980s, and the farm crisis puts everything they depend upon in danger. Bernie is only 7 when their concerns become specific, but she knows that her father, Henry, and her mother, Sylvia, are plenty worried. They know that debt, low prices for production and corporate greed could wreck the life they are used to, and as Bernie gets older, she realizes that her parents, especially her mother, were frantic at the time and didn’t know how to handle the situation.

At one point when Bernie is only 7 years old, her mother tells her, referring to Joanne: “She’s your problem now.” Bernie believes her mother. The rest of the novel is an exploration of how Bernie’s perspectives on Joanne change over time. Bernie tries to help her sister, but also not be like her. As she grows up (she is about 30 when she is organizing her memories) she learns to see the larger picture; one of the phrases Lange has Bernie use to describe herself and her sister is “junk kids.”

But Bernie’s parents are also a mystery to their children. About a third of the way into the novel, Lange writes: “I can remember seeing our parents gnawing at each other and wondering if my sister and I would ever find that kind of love, that stark addiction. Sometimes our parents demanded we go outdoors to eat our dinner or do our chores. ‘That’s what flashlights were for,’ they would say, blissed out and disgusting.”

Unfortunately, Bernie’s detailed obsession with her own feelings creates a problem for the reader: Lange doesn’t try to develop any analysis of how Bernie’s parents came to be the way they are. She settles for attributing Sylvia’s personality disorders to family history, but she doesn’t go into enough detail about the actual history to enable the reader to grasp what Bernie does not.

Lange is interested in how Bernie manages to put together her own life, and as you read, the story becomes more and more compelling. She is extremely aware of her disadvantages and of the way Joanne influences her. The difference between Bernie and Joanne is that Bernie wants things to change, both socially and politically, but she also wants to figure out how to fit in and find some pleasures even if things don’t change. Joanne is a rebel to the core, who always expresses her feelings about their parents, or about where they live, or about what she sees as threats and opportunities no matter how unusual, or, from Bernie’s point of view, cruel, her feelings are.

Lange is a generation younger than I am, and I think that she does an excellent job of depicting how frantic life has seemed for young people in the past 40 years. Can a girl or a teenager deal with it, as Bernie does, or is a young woman wiser to move to the middle of nowhere and escape it, as Joanne does?

The real pleasure of the book, once you get used to it, is the complexity of Lange’s narrative style, the way it replicates the moment-by-moment passage of time in Bernie’s life and portrays how she puts up with the difficulties of learning to understand and survive the hand she has been dealt. Funny, sad, angry, pleased, frightened, resigned — Bernie jumps from one to the other page after page and pulls the reader along with her. For a debut novel, it is quite remarkable.

Jane Smiley is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction.

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Where Kamala Harris Stands on the Issues: Abortion, Immigration and More

She wants to protect the right to abortion nationally. Here’s what else to know about her positions.

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By Maggie Astor

• Published July 21, 2024 Updated Sept. 13, 2024, 7:57 a.m. ET

Follow along with live updates on the Trump and Harris campaigns .

With Vice President Kamala Harris having replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket, her stances on key issues will be scrutinized by both parties and the nation’s voters.

She has a long record in politics: as district attorney of San Francisco, as attorney general of California, as a senator, as a presidential candidate and as vice president.

Here is an overview of where she stands.

Ms. Harris supports legislation that would protect the right to abortion nationally, as Roe v. Wade did before it was overturned in 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

After the Dobbs ruling, she became central to the Biden campaign’s efforts to keep the spotlight on abortion, given that Mr. Biden — with his personal discomfort with abortion and his support for restrictions earlier in his career — was a flawed messenger. In March, she made what was believed to be the first official visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president.

She consistently supported abortion rights during her time in the Senate, including cosponsoring legislation that would have banned common state-level restrictions, like requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions.

As a presidential candidate in 2019, she argued that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to what is known as pre-clearance for new abortion laws — those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. That proposal is not viable now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe.

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