Everything I Know About Love TV review: not enough substance to bat away the lack of originality

Everything I Know About Love
BBC1 | ★★★✩✩

Here’s everything I know about Everything I Know About Love: its seven episodes are adapted by Dolly Alderton from her bestselling autobiographical book of the same name. It’s set in 2012 and follows Dolly’s avatar, Maggie, a 24-year-old who’s just moved to London with some female university mates, with particular focus on her best friend from school, Birdy. Birdy is Jewish and is played by Bel Powley, who is also Jewish.

That’s the easy bit. Writing down everything I feel about the show is going to be much trickier. I’m conflicted, and not just from knowing Dolly a tiny bit. The problem is etched into the opening train scene. Maggie, played by Emma Appleton, meets a charming poetry-dropping bloke, and after arriving in London and sharing a kiss, she decides they shouldn’t exchange details in order to test if their perfect moment is destined to continue. Nice idea, except it’s close to the plot of romantic classic Before Sunrise. Now does Maggie know that, and consciously or not she’s trying to replicate that drama in her own life, a quintessentially 20s trait, or are we meant to buy that it’s just a coincidence? If you’ve read the book you’ll know it’s most likely the former, and kind of gets to the nub of Maggie’s issues, doing things for effect. If not, there’s little to bat away the whiff of plagiarism and lack of originality.

Later there’s a brilliantly cringeworthy scene as Maggie seductively channels Nico. It’s then sharply ruined as she cracks up laughing. You see, it’s not real, she’s deliberately doing an impression that she knows is naff. But her being in on the joke in the story kills the joke for the audience.