One Day
By the time it reached the final episode it became clear to me that this was a tv show (book) which had been written backwards. <PERSON> wanting to explore the relationship between memory and grief primarily, but unfortunately also wanting to use the death as a somewhat hacky twist bait and switch, which feels like manipulation designed to heighten emotion in an unearned way.
As a tv show I often found it very frustrating. The characters are not written beyond the confines of the episodes and often the places in which we find them each year seem very contrived. In converting everything to this episodic structure it is a lot easier to see these faults, whereas perhaps on the page or in a film there is more flow between the years, a chapter or a scene does not need to standalone as a piece of art, in the same way an episode of television does.
<PERSON> is really fantastic throughout the series. From scene to scene she is finding interesting line readings and subtle gestures. 80
Elevating the material. She is always working to find the character despite the writing's occasional jumps leaving gaps in her development.
<PERSON> has moments of brilliance. The final episode will probably make him a star. I found when he was without his co-star there was a lack of focus to his characterisation. He is a new star for a rogues gallery of sad boy actors, but unfortunately his sad character has fairly boring reasons for being sad for most of the series. It is really lazily written, and unfortunately I always felt like Woodall could not hold the weight of the bad writing in the same way <PERSON> could. 132