Graphic by Trinity Kendrick ‘21
By Rose Cohen ’22
Staff Writer & Photographer
During the first weeks of November, a handful of cheesy Christmas movies and shows begin to appear on streaming services like Hulu and Netflix. Most of them do not deserve your attention; they’re Hollywood fluff filled with cringeworthy lines, cliches and predictable character arcs. However, this year, Netflix’s adaptation of David Levithan and Rachel Cohn’s 2010 young adult novel, “Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares,” proves that worthy holiday series do exist.
The show tells the epic love story of two 17-year-olds who live in New York City. The romantic comedy takes place during the days leading up to Christmas.
Austin Abrams of “Euphoria” plays the finicky Dash, who detests the “forced cheer” and “frenzied crowds” that the holiday brings to the Big Apple. Among the tinsel, the carolers and the red and green lights, he finds peace inside the Strand Bookstore in downtown Manhattan. Surrounded by stacked aisles of fiction and nonfiction, the pessimistic Dash escapes the holiday joy by informing an employee that Gabriel García Márquez’s biography was misshelved. It “should be under ‘G’ for García, not ‘M’ for Márquez,” he explains.
The show begins to pique interest when Dash scans the J.D. Salinger section of the shop and pulls out a medium-sized red notebook. Dash, intrigued by the question on the front cover, which reads, “Do You Dare…?”, flips through the pages. He finds a series of clues and challenges written by the Christmas-loving Lily (Midori Francis). She wants to find a clever teenage boy to go on adventures with; she’s tired of spending her days playing board games with her grandfather.
Like in “You’ve Got Mail,” writer-director Nora Ephron’s 1998 romantic comedy, the two main characters have never met in real life. For the majority of the series, they only communicate through dares that they create for one another in the notebook. This means that Dash accepts Lily’s challenges, even if they tell him to sing Joni Mitchell’s Christmas folk song “River” in the middle of the Strand. He then creates his own dares and leaves the notebook for her to find so their game can continue. If you accept this improbable premise, you will enjoy the show.
You will also need to embrace the fact that Lily knows a good amount of the people involved in her dares. Her cousin works at the Strand, and he can ensure that Dash completes the challenges that take place there. Her uncle dresses up as Santa Claus at the Macy’s department store, and that makes it okay for Dash to steal his Santa hat to complete a dare.
As the series progresses, we find out about the two teenagers’ past heartbreaks. Lily has felt like a freak and an outsider since her middle school crush bullied her years earlier. Dash dealt with loneliness after his ex-girlfriend moved to Brazil, leaving him bereft in New York. With each dare, the characters bring out the best in one another and slowly force each other out of their comfort zones.
It’s heartwarming to see Dash encourage the socially-anxious Lily — who spends her time sewing her own clothes — to attend a 2 a.m. Jewish punk show on the seventh night of Hanukkah. And it is just as meaningful to see the impatient Dash “go with the flow” in a mochi-making class, surrounded by Japanese grandmothers.
Another great storyline in the show includes Lily’s queer brother, Langston (Troy Iwata). We get to see his love story unfold and witness him as a three-dimensional character. In an interview with The Wrap, Iwata commented on the role, stating, “Langston is just this really fun, quirky, snarky human who happens to be gay and it’s never really questioned or challenged by himself or any of his friends.”
“Dash & Lily” allows you to fall in love with the challenges in the red notebook and the characters involved. If you are looking to binge-watch a holiday series that actually has a somewhat meaningful plot, set aside roughly three-and-a-half hours for “Dash & Lily.”