Dexter and Emma meet on the night of their graduation in 1988 and part the next morning with a promise to stay friends. The Netflix adaptation of David Nicholls's novel revisits them on 15 July every year for the next two decades — a structural device that shouldn't work on television and yet does, carried by Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall's extraordinarily lived-in chemistry. The romance is the hook; the ache of time passing is why it lingers.
