A holiday romance with depth and dares
Dash & Lily is the Netflix adaptation of the young adult novel, Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, co-authored by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. The story follows titular characters, Dash and Lily, as they begin correspondence via a book of dares, a red notebook passed between the characters. There, they write to each other about their lives, but only after they have successfully completed a dare — a boundary pushing task to get each of them out of their comfort zone. Through this, the characters learn about themselves and each other, explore New York City, and fall in love over the course of the winter holiday.
While Dash & Lily may seem on the surface to be just another escapist romance set in New York around the holidays, this show does have interesting things to say about how people connect, getting out of one’s comfort zone, and how a rigid definition of one’s self can trap someone in their own routines. The characters are incredibly distinct, this being both true of the two mains and of the side characters; everyone feels like they have their own world going on, but the audience is only privy to their actions when they cross paths with Dash and Lily’s story. Several of the characters, mostly from Lily’s family and friends, feel interesting and dynamic enough to deserve their own show. Most notable among this camp is Lily’s great aunt Lillian, also known as Mrs. Basil E, who steals every scene she’s in.
Lily herself is another stand-out character. While one may look at her and dismiss her as just quirky and “not like other girls,” the series goes to great lengths to explore her character and explain why she’s like this. Lily is an optimistic but lonely, young person who has trouble connecting to people her own age. Her support network consists entirely of her own family, or with adults she has common interests with. She is honestly herself, and the show takes it upon itself to explore how being that authentic at a young age can affect kids and how they grow up.
For Lily, this is exemplified by her relationship with Edgar, someone she knew in middle school (who also knows Dash because this show really likes to show how small this world is) who comes back into her life near the beginning of the show. When they were younger, Edgar called her weird and threw away a homemade bracelet she gave him. While this action may seem somewhat inconsequential, it really stuck with Lily. What makes this even more fascinating is that now that they are older, Edgar takes an almost fetishistic view of her weirdness. In much of their later interactions, Edgar sees Lily mostly as an object and less like her own fully formed individual.
Another major theme of this series is expanding your comfort zone. Lily starts as someone who has trouble connecting with others before being pushed to meet more people through the dares, but the transformation over the course of the series can also be seen with Dash. He begins to say yes to a lot of things, say making mochi in a kitchen where he doesn’t speak the language, and learns better how to cope with stressful situations instead of lashing out. By the end, Lily is willing to take risks for things she cares about, and Dash is better able to let people in — not only Lily, but his group of friends as well.
This show is not going to be for everyone. It is a sweet, overly sincere, at times logic-breaking love story. Its teenage characters can be incredibly pretentious at points. Even with all that, there is something real in Dash & Lily, and it’s hard to quite determine what. Yes, the teens are pretentious, but they’re also still learning and growing, and many of them do throughout this season. Overall, Dash & Lily is an interesting love story told well with a little dash of holiday cheer to warm even the grumpiest Grinch’s heart this holiday season.
