Review of Dash & Lily

Several years ago, when the pandemic was first starting, I remember Dash & Lily first came out. I pressed play because what else did we have to do when we all went into quarantine, and I was missing New York. When COVID-19 first hit, I was in my sophomore year of college in New York City and remember when everything was first starting to shut down. So a television series set in New York City? Count me in.

But back then, I thought the first episode was so terrible that I immdiately stopped watching. Which says something because of how the episodes are only twenty minutes. Now, three years later, I pressed played yet again and somehow ended up binge watching all of Dash & Lily in a single day. Did I think the show was good this time around? Not really, but it wasn’t terrible, either. It was the perfect kind of show that you mindlessly watch and wonder about the logistics since some things straight up don’t make any sense.

Onwards with the review!

Dash and Lily communicate through a single red notebook and go through scavenger hunts throughout New York City.

This review is going to be more of a commentary one than I usually do on this blog, because boy do I have a lot of thoughts about the show. The basic premise is that Lily hides a little red notebook with a puzzle of things to do in the Strand bookstore, where she is friends with one of the employees who serves as the guardian of the notebook essentially, and Dash, having recently broken up with his girlfriend, finds it while wandering the store one day. He solves the puzzles inside of it and figures out the next part of the clue, leading him to write back and forth with Lily.

Lily’s parents have gone to Fiji for the holidays, which is devastating considering it’s her favorite holiday. She’s left alone with her brother and his boyfriend, who end up having a lover’s spat, and then her grandfather later on in the episodes. One of the interesting things to me is that these are all presumably high school students in New York, as Lily is mentioned to be a minor, yet they just roam the streets and never mention any school at all.

They’re all definitely ridiculously wealthy judging from their parent’s apartments, too. Lily’s family’s brownstone apartment is massive by New York City standards and definitely would cost over $5,000 in rent with that location. Even Dash’s father’s apartment is gorgeous and probably extremely expensive, and judging from the kind of place his father took him and his new side girl to eat at, his family has money as well.

Dash also tricks his parents into thinking he’s with the other one (they’re divorced), which makes sense if they don’t talk to each other, but you’d think they’d communicate over their son, who is underage, and his whereabouts.

Essentially the series hinges on the entire fact that these two are supposed to get the feelings and fall in love with each other while trading their secrets and notes in the notebook, which is passed along through a wide variety of means. They keep up the ruse until the end of the series, when they realize who the other person is, but some of the things that happen beforehand are just kind of cringey and feel as a vehicle to keep the plot moving. For example, Dash’s old girlfriend moves back into town and there’s a cliffhanger where it seems like the two are going to sleep together.

I think this could’ve worked if the series were longer, like Korean drama length: aka sixteen episodes. Part of the problem for me is that we’re not given the space and time to truly connect with these characters, and everything feels like it’s rushed. This needed to be longer than eight episodes, and because it is so short, we end up cramming everything in during a short amount of time.

That’s not good; as viewers, we need time to digest and breathe. But still I watched the series all the way through, which helps because of how short the episodes are. It’s honestly only four episodes at the end of the day when you look at the running time of each episode.

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