Dash & Lily

A Notebook in the Snow

I keep thinking about how Dash & Lily makes New York look both enormous and tiny at once. A city that usually prides itself on anonymity gets turned into a chain of secret handoffs, dares, and overheard confessions. latestnetflix.com's view is that that’s the show’s neatest trick: it takes the old rom-com fantasy of two people finding each other in a crowd and gives it a paper trail.

Literal paper, too — a red notebook that travels through bookstores, delis, sidewalks, and holiday clutter like a small, stubborn pulse.

What interested me most, though, is that the series doesn’t really believe in the easy version of opposites attract. It knows the premise is cute, maybe even a little schematic. A cynical boy and a buoyant girl, both hiding loneliness behind style and wit, exchanging challenges across the city during Christmas week — you can feel the machinery from the first episode.

But the show is smarter than its own setup in one important way: it understands that intimacy often begins as performance. Dash and Lily don’t fall for each other because they are “meant” to; they fall because they’re willing to be ridiculous in front of someone they can’t quite see.

That’s where the series, adapted from Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult novel Dash & Lily’s Book of Dares, fits into the larger Netflix holiday ecosystem. It arrived in 2020, when the platform was already treating seasonal romance like a reliable annual product, but this one had a slightly different flavor. It wasn’t baking cookies in a fake small town.

It was trying to sell New York as a city of possibility, which is a much harder pitch, and a more interesting one. The show’s creator trio — Joe Tracz, Nick Jones, and Fred Savage — comes from a background that leans toward lightness and structure, and you can feel that in the brisk pacing. There’s not much room for dead air.

Every episode wants to move, to hand off the notebook, to get to the next joke or dare or accidental self-revelation.

That urgency helps the series, but it also reveals its limits. Sometimes the script is so eager to sustain whimsy that it steps around the messier parts of being young: the bad timing, the embarrassment that lingers, the parts of yourself you don’t know how to say out loud. Still, I admired the discipline of the format.

Eight episodes is enough. More would’ve turned the notebook into a gimmick. Less, and the emotional pattern wouldn’t have had time to breathe.

The central conversation around the show, at least as I saw it, wasn’t whether it reinvented the holiday romance. Nobody was really asking that. The question was whether it could feel fresh without getting cynical about its own sweetness.