In late twentieth century Britain, they wrote letters

Watching the arc of a long friendship

Ever since I started slow-reading War and Peace at the beginning of the year — and, at the last minute, decided I would read it in Russian, followed by a confirming chaser of English translation — I’ve watched remarkably little television. A few weeks ago, though, I started seeing references to the new Netflix series One Day that got me intrigued. I’d never seen the Anne Hathaway movie, and I was only vaguely aware that it was based on a novel by David Nicholls. I had an idea that it was a saccharine story about a star-crossed couple with an overly-clever structure of visiting them on the same day every year over two decades.

And yes, it is about two friends who meet at the very end of their undergrad degrees. And yes, there are many twists and turns to that friendship. And yes, the action takes place on the same day every year for twenty years. But it is not saccharine, or overly-clever, at least the new television series (and having now skimmed the original novel, I feel confident the same goes for the source material): it’s moving, and very human.

Boy meets girl. Popular boy meets quirky girl. They have one wonderful, confusing night together (shades of Before Sunrise). And then — and this is really the most surprising and delightful part — they are good friends for a long time, as they move into adulthood on entirely different paths. Like nineteenth-century Russians, they write letters. One moves into a glamorous field, the other toils out of the spotlight and feels frustrated with the trajectory of post-degree life. They have partners. They call each other every day, and have falling-outs that neither one of them knows how to fix. They go through the trials that every close friendship of many years’ standing persists through. Once a year, we check in and see where they are.

The series is, in the fashion of many streaming shows, made up of episodes of uneven length. But this makes sense, here. Some episodes are a single scene. Someone described it as a bunch of one-act plays, which is good description: other characters enter, recur, disappear. The protagonists and their friends move from the beginning of adulthood to somewhere closer to the middle.

One of the very best things about the series is the soundtrack, which plays a huge role in establishing the passing of time from 1988 to 2008. The story is set in the UK, so there’s a lot that I’m not overly familiar with, but that still rings right for each era. And instead of clunkily using only music of the given year/decade to mark time, the characters are allowed to listen to non-contemporary artists like Nick Drake and the Velvet Underground. Wonderfully, the novel’s author, David Nicholls, who is also a fantastic screenwriter (he wrote the screenplay for the terrifying adaptation of the Patrick Melrose novels) and, based on his social media presence, seems to be really nice guy, created playlists on Spotify for the main characters and the mixed tapes they would have given each other. I’ve been listening to Emma Morley’s for weeks now:

The day we glimpse into Emma and Dexter’s life every year is July 15th, which I learned through the show is St. Swithin’s Day. I’ve always associated St. Swithin’s Day with romantic yearning, because I know of it through a Billy Bragg song that I might have discovered through a mixed tape given to me… or might just have discovered on my own during the time I was in the business of receiving mixed tapes.

It’s a lovely song, certainly worthy of Song of the Day (or month or year), and the lyrics also feature letters:

Thanks all the same
But I just can't bring myself to answer your letters
It's not your fault
But your honesty touches me like a fire
The Polaroids that hold us together
Will surely fade away
Like the love that we spoke of forever
On St. Swithin's Day

It seems like a miss not to have hear this on the soundtrack for One Day. But happily, Emma Morley, music-snob protagonist, has included it in her playlist.