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.

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.