What makes us care about the characters in a television show? It’s a strange relationship we have with them, an unfamiliarity that turns into something akin to family. Soon enough, you’re a Soprano or a Simpson, part of the Brady bunch or in with the Ewing clan. And then TV can play its great emotional trick: it can put these characters through tragedy and triumph, and make the viewer feel that it’s theirs. This is the well-worn pathway that You & Me, the new ITVX three-part drama, forswears. Instead, we are dropped into a world and asked to care, straight away, when things begin in media misery.
“I don’t want to tell a sad story,” Ben (Industry’s Harry Lawtey) tells up-and-coming actress Emma (The End of the F***ing World’s Jessica Barden). “I don’t want them to be a sad story.” He’s talking about his twins: Ben is a solo parent to a little boy and girl whose mother, Jess (The Witcher: Blood Origin’s Sophia Brown), died in the opening scenes of the show. Jess flittered into Ben’s life, flirted for a few minutes, hooked up for a few minutes, got pregnant for a few minutes, and then died. And that’s Ben’s foundational trauma. Sorry pal: it’s a sad story.
