'Dash & Lily' & My Existential Crisis

The Netflix Christmas fluff that broke my heart.

I am very sad.

There is a new Netflix show called Dash & Lily. It is, in spirit, a Christmas movie, just one that’s been stretched into eight episodes of about 20 minutes each. It could have easily been seven episodes, or even six, but the powers that be gave us eight. I started the first episode on Friday afternoon, and in the blink of an eye I’d seen them all. They go down smooth.

The plot of Dash & Lily is not important. It’s light and cute and sweet and not that deep. The two leads, high school students, never go to school, and their parents are conveniently absentee so they can go on Christmas- and Hanukkah- themed adventures in N.Y.C. Other viewers have compared the series to a Hallmark movie, but as someone who has actually watched a lot of Hallmark movies, it is better than that. It’s not great, but it’s much better than it needed to be. The show is warm and charming and a nice little escape from the hell we live in.

This is Dash and this is Lily from Netflix’s Dash & Lily.

Except. It’s not an escape at all. It’s fucking agony. Because the titular Dash and Lily get to do all the things I wish I was doing with every fiber of my being right now.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel quite as sad about the show if I didn’t live in New York. The series’ earliest scenes are set in Union Square, at the Christmas market I love and won’t be able to go to this year, and at The Strand, where I have spent many an hour getting lost with my friends, and where I haven’t been in months (nevermind that the pandemic has revealed the owner as pretty evil!). Dash visits his friend Boomer at Two Boots Pizza on Avenue A, next door to what used to the UCB Theater in the East Village. Once I sat there with my friends before an improv show, eating garlic knots, and vaguely watching Holes on the TV. The theater is gone. I haven’t seen those friends since March.

In one episode, Dash and Boomer go to Macy’s, which is technically a tourist trap. But I used to walk by it all the time, getting off the subway at Herald Square to go to improv class, to go to a hockey game, to go to a movie, to get bubble tea before I had to go to work ten blocks uptown. Then Dash goes all the way to South Brooklyn to see the Christmas lights in Dyker Heights; when we were kids my parents would drive us around to look at those very same Christmas lights every winter.

The show is goofy. Every stranger on the street is so nice and helpful. Fun things just pop up everywhere. It’s fake! I know it’s fake!

And yet!

Lily and her family are supposed to be classic New Yorkers. They’re friends with everyone: booksellers, struggling actors, bakery employees, the guy who plays Santa at Macy’s. It’s over-the-top and unrealistic, because this is a TV show. But I miss the librarian I used to see once a week when I was dropping off books. I miss the guy who worked at the taco truck by my job who knew I always wanted a veggie burrito with cheese. I miss the lady who worked at Dunkin’ Donuts who always wore cute lipstick. I miss stopping into the T2 on Prince Street to try all the free samples. I miss my old job at the cupcake store where I knew people who worked at seemingly every store in Soho and sold them inexplicably affordable cups of coffee.

But more than anything I miss the possibility of it all. Dash goes to a bookstore and finds a notebook that leads him to a girl he comes to love (it’s GOOFY but sweet, I promise). Of course this would not happen in real life, but every day I went out into the world, my life was full of the possibility that something, anything could actually fucking happen to me. In quarantine, nothing happens. Every day blends together. If something does happen, it’s bad. A beloved restaurant closes. Cases rise. The governor hedges on television. And the thing that makes this monotony, this lack of possibility, the most unbearable is that we still have no clue as to when it will end. I hear people planning for 2021, and it feels like they’re hoarding fool’s gold.

I’m so sad all the time. It’s not the fault of Dash & Lily. But the show uncovered something I was trying to keep buried way down: This knowledge of all the things I am missing right now, the ephemeral moments we’ll never get back.

We can look at rising cases, at the jobs lost, at the people who are struggling. There are numbers for those things. But there is no way to quantify the joy we are losing. I cannot count the happiness molecules I would have gotten at a friend’s cookie swap party, or walking through the Christmas market eating rice balls, or singing Christmas carols at church. It’s just gone. We’ll never get it back.

We put up our Christmas tree this weekend. Usually we wait until the day after Thanksgiving, but we thought we needed the joy a little early this year.

I looked at the tree and thought, “I’m still sad.”

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