![]() Francis imbues her with a humanity and an emotional generosity that feel all too real. Midori Francis is a revelation as the quirky Lily, a character who might feel trite and stereotypical if handled less delicately. Austin Abrams’s Dash, with his sulky demeanor, sells you on his self-imposed isolation, but he also delivers a tingle of mischievous earnestness to the role that reveals there is more to this guy than meets the eye. ![]() It is genuinely affecting, and the leads carry their roles admirably well. ![]() This is not to say that “Dash & Lily” is quality television simply because it hits you at the right time. The city we have lost is the one that “Dash & Lily” offers up as a pick-me-up, no matter how much of a fantasy it may be.ĭash & Lily is a New York teenage fantasia, with a reverent love for the city it celebrates. “Dash & Lily,” with its multiracial cast and city landmarks packed to the gills with holiday revelers, reminds us of the way New York is meant to be. It is almost painfully evocative of the New York that has gone missing because of the pandemic. It’s a teenage fantasia, one in which young New Yorkers regularly go to mochi-making classes taught by Japanese grandmothers and Jewish punk concerts guarded by drag queens. The show encompasses the whole city, taking the viewer everywhere from bookstores in Union Square to Christmas shows at Macy’s to cheese pie restaurants in Bay Ridge and nutcracker houses in Dyker Heights, both in Brooklyn. It holds a deep, reverent love for New York. It helps that the sincerity of “Dash & Lily” extends far beyond its rom-com influences. “Dash & Lily” clearly loves the material it’s working from, while other films might be too caught up in attempting to replicate their sources’ constituent elements to understand why they work in the first place. “Dash & Lily” wears its influences on its sleeve, and you will find smatterings of other rom-coms in its DNA, from “Love, Actually” to “Notting Hill.” It is these obvious allusions that allow “Dash & Lily” to succeed where other Netflix romantic comedies tend to fail. It’s sort of a “You’ve Got Mail” for Generation Z. One of the leads even cites “You’ve Got Mail” (which itself was inspired by the 1940 film “The Shop Around the Corner”) by name. Nora Ephron’s classic 1998 romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks may not be the the film everyone thinks of when they think of Ephron’s filmography (see “When Harry Met Sally” or “Sleepless in Seattle”), but it is the clearest influence on “Dash & Lily.” Quite a few elements from “You’ve Got Mail” make their way into this show: the magical New York setting, star-crossed lovers who do not know what the other looks like. That “You’ve Got Mail” comparison is an appropriate one. ![]() Through most of the show, the pair do not meet in person, instead using the red notebook to trade dares, in exchange for which they begin to learn more and more about each other. When cheerful, optimistic Lily slips a mysterious red notebook onto a bookshelf in the Strand, the brooding loner Dash finds it and gets swept up into an adventure as Lily teaches him to fall in love with Christmas. “Dash & Lily” is close to the perfect balm for a world in which the holidays just don’t feel like the holidays. The Strand, perhaps New York City’s most iconic bookstore, even serves as a central location in the show, and is where this story starts. Sallinger and characters like Cyrano de Bergerac. Indeed, the show is obsessed with literature, with references to writers like J. The names of the two title characters, Dash and Lily, allude to Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman, a pair of mid-20th century novelists who fell deeply in love. It may be a cliché to call it “the show that we need right now” but Netflix’s “Dash & Lily” is close to the perfect balm for a world in which the holidays just don’t feel like the holidays. It is a rare thing when a piece of new holiday media comes out and it actually manages to make you feel like you’re snuggled under a warm blanket, sipping a mug of hot cocoa and hanging out with friends you have known your whole life.
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