REVIEW: ‘One Day’ Is A Lovely Decade-Spanning Love Story

Nearly every year on July 15th, Emma (Ambika Mod) and Dexter (Leo Woodall) spend it together in the Netflix Original series One Day (2024) created by Nicole Taylor and based on the book of the same name by David Nicholls. They meet at their college graduation and have a whirlwind of a one-night fling. Sort of. For the next 20 years, we watch Dex and Emma’s ups and downs—their friendship, love, and their lives, together and apart.

One Day (2024) is excellent. The casting is the biggest reason why. Mod’s Emma is the perfect blend of nervous and confidence while Woodall’s Dex equally marries cocky with sincerity. They’re splendid together in every phase of their lives. From the moment they first meet you’re struck by how they both disarm each other instantly. It’s unexpected, on their faces and in our imagination of what a one-night-stand is supposed to look like. But it’s also as if it was pre-ordained. This is the only way these two characters could possibly have begun their relationship, given everything they become over the years.

And we see it all. Love and loss, success and failure. Sometimes, Emma and Dex are there for each other. Sometimes, they aren’t. And sometimes, they are and it was the worst night of their lives. Or, sometimes the encounter was exactly what they needed for the people they were at the time. The greatest lesson One Day (2024) imparts is that the only true consistency in a relationship is that time will pass. We can’t control what happens in the time between. We can only do our best to love the people we love and give them the chance to love us back.

The lesson is well-learned. The show’s format makes sure of it. Most episodes jump ahead to July 15th of the following year, forcing the viewer to surmise what may have happened in Dex and Emma’s lives in the days in between. Maybe the passage of time is mundane. Maybe, an episode ends with a cliffhanger. You can’t even tell what happened until halfway through the next episode because the characters have long forgotten about it. Sometimes the next episode picks up and so much has changed that you’re spinning around trying to catch up. The episodes are all structured with these time jumps in mind.

At first, the episodic nature felt like a little bit of a disservice. The gaps felt like they were leaving too much out or the pacing felt like it was forcing itself into the same number of minutes per episode. But with so many episodes and so much time passing in the show, by the back half, you settle into the nature of time’s flow. You can neither rush nor slow down the amount that happens in a year. If anything, the format of One Day (2024) helps highlight this truth. All the predictions you could make, or the longing to pick up old threads, are ultimately meaningless when facing the inevitability of time’s passage.

One Day is a nearly perfect love story. Just come prepared with many tissues and a tolerance for inequitable growth between the two main characters. Most of the show is great at giving Emma and Dex equal screen time and equal amounts of plot. But the show is ultimately about Dex. The biggest emotional beats revolve around the way the people in his life, especially women, shape the person he becomes. It’s not a burden on the majority of the series, since he isn’t the only focus by any means. But the weight of this misbalance does grow heavy in the end. Especially if you’re not expecting it.

Thankfully, One Day (2024) is also littered with some of the hottest music of each year in its journey to send you down your own memory lane. The line dance songs of the day, the radio bops, the love songs. The jukebox turns on a few too many times in some early episodes, but it balances out quickly and has basically no misses. It’s fun to do your own reminiscing on who you were when each song was popular while jumping expeditiously through time every 30 minutes for seven hours. Also, shout out to whoever did the typeface for the title cards. They are perfect at the beginning of every episode.

Forgiving the show of its inevitable misbalance in who gets to develop the most and why between Dex and Emma, it’s a great love story. Despite what most popular depictions of love would have you believe, love takes time. Sometimes decades. It can, and will, go through so many different phases and highs and lows. By the end, you might forget some of the details. But One Day (2024) is nearly perfect at depicting all of them. With utterly charming main characters who you cannot help but root for together and independently the whole way through, One Day (2024) is a fantastic watch for lovers of romance. As long as you bring a box of tissues along.

One Day (2024) is streaming now Netflix.