Before we get into it, this isn’t a question of likeability – a word more overused in TV development meetings even than the phrase ‘Here’s your flat white, Tristan’. Likeability is a crutch for media execs who unimaginatively assume that audiences seek the same qualities in a character as they do in a Labrador retriever. Much more important than likeability is recognition. We don’t need to like a character to see them in ourselves and others. The companionship offered by fiction doesn’t have to be a love-in.
More or less the whole point of Dexter Mayhew in One Day is that he isn’t likeable. Handsome, privileged, entitled, unserious… he’s everything Emma Morley isn’t. She’s working class, clever, politicised and funny, and yet she loves Dexter and even likes him too. And because Emma loves and likes Dex, who is by turns weak, selfish and arrogant, the reader is prepared to put up with him to see what the fuss is about.
Through putting up with Dexter over the length of the novel, the reader comes to see him as Emma (mostly) does – a lost, kind, funny person to whom life has taught all the wrong lessons. Dexter’s always been moneyed, so has never learned what money means. He’s famous, so he’s learned that he’s more important than people who aren’t. He’s handsome, so has learned that his good looks are what make him valuable, and so on.
Time and again, Dexter draws unhelpful (if understandable) conclusions from the world. Emma sees all of that and therefore so do we. Like her, we want Dexter to be better. And because we recognise him, we know he’s capable of it. Nobody around Emma understands her loyalty to Dexter – least of all her live-in boyfriend Ian – but we understand it. That’s the attraction of their intimacy in the book; like all good love stories, it belongs only to them, and to us.
In the film, none of that knotty push-pull stuff comes across with Dexter. Jim Sturgess’ character is just the public version of the man – a cocky posh twat to whom Emma is inexcusably drawn. Despite pinning all of the book’s landmark events to the screen, the film is incapable of explaining why this particular girl would ever persevere with this particular boy. Film Dexter is neither likeable nor recognisable. He’s a cliché of playboy swagger whose occasional sadface moments reveal little but more self-regard.
In Nicole Taylor’s Netflix series though, which has over seven hours and 14 episodes to show us the pair from every angle, Dexter’s an even better developed character than Emma. We spend more time with him in crisis. We meet his family but not hers. Played by Leo Woodall (last seen memorably as Essex boy Jack in The White Lotus season two), Dexter is everything he is in the book and more. He’s cocky, glib and occasionally hateful, but also vulnerable, underestimated and sweet.
