TV’s Year of Big Disappointments

This
is, admittedly, and somewhat hyperbolically, a grim picture to paint. But I’m
not writing about disappointment and the year in TV only because I feel
disappointed in the year in TV. I’m also writing about it because some of the
very best TV shows I saw this year are themselves about disappointment.
Narratively, formally, even stylistically, many of the shows that felt most
urgent to me this year took as their subjects stymied hope, frustrated
ambition, letdowns big and small. 

A
great example of this is Netflix’s excellent, strangely underdiscussed
romantic-comedy series One Day. The show is based on David Nicholls’s
bestselling novel, which tracks the lives of Dexter and Emma, a pair of
occasionally star-crossed lovers, by narrating what happens to them every July
15 for a period of 20 years. The 2011 feature film adaptation (starring
Anne Hathaway) suffered from having to condense this sprawling, economical
formal constraint into 108 minutes, but the streaming series cannily takes
advantage of its episodic medium, mostly dedicating each of its 14 episodes to the
July 15 of a single year (the final two episodes cover a few years at a
time).

What
could be disappointing about a TV show afforded both the opportunity to deploy
an ambitious formal gimmick and miraculously granted the luxury of a
14-episode season in this economy? First, having each episode dramatize only
a single day’s events means that viewers really feel, by way of a kind of negative
accumulation, all that we can’t and don’t see. The show is admirably abrupt
about this, rarely ever cheating, allowing off-screen events, however
monumental, to remain off-screen, perceived only by their impact on the 15th of
July. Sometimes we see both characters—played with incredible natural ease by
Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall—in an episode, sometimes only one or the other.
Sometimes an episode meaningfully and dramatically advances the plot, sometimes
it just sits back and observes. It’s a frustrating narrative technique, but, in
its deprivations and disappointments, it formally makes the argument about time
and regret, pride and prejudice that animates the story as a whole. And that’s
not even to mention the now-infamous, but still eminently spoilable, tragic
twist that ends the whole series, rendering bitter the otherwise sweet
conclusion of 12 years, and episodes, of will-they-won’t-they. One Day is
a show that speaks plainly and formally embodies an insight about disappointment
itself: that every human life, no matter how joyfully well spent or
devastatingly wasted, is set within an arc of disappointment in the end. If
you’re looking for meaning in the big payoff, you’re looking in the wrong
place.