Dash & Lily celebrates jerky behavior

Slate

"It’s a true holiday fantasy, packed full of every conceivable Christmas song and incredibly colorful (but still tasteful) costumes and décor," says Karen Han of the Netflix series starring Midori Francis and Austin Abrams. "But it’s also a fantasy built on a series of crimes against people working in the retail and service industries. Dash and Lily may be the cutest couple on TV, but they’re also, not to put too fine a point on it, jerks. Dash & Lily’s inciting incident is a prime example of their jerkitude. Lily, feeling a little lonely given that her brother has found a new boyfriend, her parents are in Fiji, and her grandfather has gone to Florida, decides to go with her brother’s idea for finding a new love. Based on her love of books and how much easier she finds it to express her feelings through writing, she plants a notebook in the Strand bookstore containing a dare—sing a song out loud in the middle of the store—and an invitation, if the dare is fulfilled, to strike up a correspondence. It’s an appealingly romantic idea but also a clear violation of an unspoken social code. You aren’t supposed to leave personal belongings in a store on purpose, and you definitely aren’t supposed to ask the store’s employees to help you do it. For Lily’s scheme to work, a Strand employee has to keep tabs on the notebook and be fully in on the scheme in order to keep it from being pulled from its place or otherwise thrown out."