User Reviews (18)

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  • This started out well enough. Sure it is overly stylized, the music, though good, overwhelms the film, and some of the plot points are heavy handed, but I could overlook that in a made for television movie. The leads (Jones and Moyer) are attractive, and have some chemistry. I found Moyer gives his character a wounded quality of one whose circumstances have forced him mature before his time. Jones' character is, at times, inexplicably prickly and insensitive, but overall, she carries it off. Together, the two appear to have great potential.

    However, the constant arguments that seem to come out of nowhere, can and do take their toll on the viewer. Like the couple, I still came back for more. I watched all seven episodes, despite eventually wishing the pair would just end it already.
  • Charming leads, interesting location shoots, and a boppy soundtrack make for a pretty mini-series, but one lacking in much backbone or substance.

    The production hinges on the two leads: Edie, the poor but lovable social-worker-record-store-worker, and Michael, the bad-boy-banker-with-a-heart-of-gold. Yes, they are types and stock characters. They meet by chance when Edie visits London and needs to borrow some money from a bloke in a pub. He gets her number, and the hijinks ensue.

    They begin a tentative transatlantic romance, with complications of former lovers, jobs, friends and family, as well as their own cautious natures, standing in the way of True Love.

    So should you spend 7 hours watching this series? I was utterly charmed, but recognize some drawbacks: wooden dialogue (and acting), silly situations worthy of a bedroom farce (mistaken identities and the like), and a lack of realism (how does poor Edie manage to buy those tickets to London? Guess she has good credit!)

    I chalk up my enjoyment of the series to the leads, especially to Stephen Moyer, who brings an edge and a sly wit to Michael. Despite tragically misguided sideburns, he is a strong presence, and manages to overcome the limitations of the dialogue and trite situations.

    Rashida Jones fares less well. She is certainly beautiful (Peggy Lipton + the "Q" = gorgeous), but is more shaky in her command of the character and dialogue. I haven't seen Ms. Jones in other roles, so no harm, no foul. I'm not sure how many actors could pull this character off. All I can say is I enjoyed watching her struggle, and she did OK with a tough assignment.

    The last characters worth mentioning are the cities of London and New York. Nicely done exterior shots provide more realism than the story itself. Add in great soundtrack, and I was happily diverted.
  • pepekwa14 January 2007
    Warning: Spoilers
    i enjoyed this series immensely despite it ending in the worst possible way. This show more any other needed a second series to tie things up, go into characters' details in more depth which would hopefully explain a few things that had happened before eg, some info about the respective dysfunctional families of michael and edie. Low ratings and the producer jumping ship means we'll never know what happened when michael calls edie back after the last bust-up. That aside, if you liked in your face hip shows like "This Life" and "Teachers" (both uk shows) you'll like this a lot. The acting was very good i thought and there was some good development of the other characters when in fact it would have been more helpful to find out more about michael and edie. As the world gets smaller, there will be more shows like this highlighting the doomed long distance relationship. Just one more point though, a long distance relationship is not one when you don't see someone for 3/4 days and all of the buying last minute plane tickets in reality would cost absolute fortunes.
  • Thoroughly enjoyable, well acted, well written; however, didn't amount to what it could have.

    The production seemed to be a bit mismanaged, never really getting its legs despite strong and true performances from the cast and an intelligently written script. The show suffered the fate of too many cooks in the kitchen, where it needed a single style, single direction. For example, the split-screen effect was not altogether a bad idea, but it was rarely used for any real benefit. Likewise, there were story ideas that were never fully sussed out. In the end it looked like a jumbled product of three directors who could have benefited greatly from a single executive producer's vision.

    Still, it was one of the better programs of 2004, it just hurts to see so much effort and such talent amount to an "almost".
  • joyncali24 August 2006
    Unlike the other review... I think this show is innovative and very interesting...

    I have gotten my friends into the show and can't wait to see more episodes..

    Everyone who I know that watches the show finds it entertaining and well worth searching for it..

    It is a TV show not an Oscar winning documentary... So I find the 1st review very brutal.

    Tivo it and make up your own mind about it..

    The characters are interesting and multi-faceted.
  • Warning: Spoilers
    The premise is really good: two people meet by chance in London. One is a New Yorker on a visit; the other is a Londoner. They are both young, single, and relatively educated, but polar opposites in terms of outlook on life. There is an initial spark at the first meeting and Michael (the Londoner) takes a chance to pursue it.

    **Spoilers**

    Edie and Michael have to work through the long distance relationship thing and whether it is worth doing something so costly. He is a banker with a heart of gold, and she is an idealistic young woman who teaches adult literacy and works as shop clerk. Her friends are grungy musician types (except for one) and she is estranged from family. Michael has working class roots and helps his dysfunctional family. His friends are mostly professional types. The challenges are believable; however, the character of Edie is portrayed as incredibly immature, selfish, and hostile most of the time. She has baggage--fine--but no less than Michael, who seems to be the adult in the relationship. There are some sweet moments, but the relationship is ultimately unconvincing and frustrating, mostly because Edie (and occasionally Michael) does not want to make sacrifices to be together--or even make an effort to understand another human being. Side note: Michael's London friends are portrayed as genuinely nice people while Edie's friends are judgmental and unstable. Perhaps the writers' commentary on British and American cultures?

    Stephen Moyer makes a real effort portraying Michael as an earnest and vulnerable person wanting a relationship. Rashida Jones overplays the American brashness, I think, or perhaps she is just miscast. The dialogue is okay, but missing that British comedy snark and sparkle. (How many times must Edie call Michael "pathetic"?!) The series could have had SO much more humor and soul. I hope someone takes this basic story line and rewrites it into a satisfying series or film.

    **Ending Spoiler** Michael proposes. Edie says she doesn't believe in the institution of marriage. They argue and return to their respective cities. Afterward, they each call each other once and leave voicemails but ultimately do not connect, leaving things open ended. Also, this was 2004! I don't care if Edie says she hates email. People email as a basic form of communication!
  • rsampron14 January 2007
    We are halfway through watching this on BBC America, so we don't know how it ends.

    So far all I can say is this program is a wonderful surprise.

    It was scheduled for the middle of the night last week on BBC America, so TIVO did it's job and we are now going through it during a very chilly weekend. It has turned the chill into a warm glow.

    The storyline is completely realistic, which is always my requirement for stories of star-crossed lovers. The characters are totally plausible. The acting is top notch.

    I've been a fan of Rashida Jones since she was on Boston Public. The girl's got chops! We've also seen Stephen Moyer in other projects (Midsomer Murders, Waking the Dead) and think he is ready for the big screen. The supporting actors are all excellent, and I never cease to be amazed by how well actors from the UK do American accents. They are completely believable.

    Now for the writing. Simon Burke has a real ear for both America and British idioms. As a novelist myself, I will tell you this is not easy. We use completely different expressions right down to our verb tenses, and Burke seems to have both down cold. I'm a writer myself, so I pay special attention to idioms. When they're wrong, it's like nails on a chalkboard. Well done, Simon. Edie, Christine and Luke sound like Americans.

    And a note about the music in this series. The music flows throughout like a Greek chorus, embellishing the plot line beautifully. A great deal of thought must have gone into that. Real artists pay attention to those kinds of details. Well, well done!

    Enjoy!
  • So funny that this show has been over for nearly five years and 2 of us here stumbled across it (Hulu) just this week. I did like it enough that I wish it had pulled itself out of its aggravating, self-destructive Will they/won't they? trajectory and become something more, with more episodes to provide the quite diverting qualities that the show did have going for it. Loved the male lead; thought Rashida Jones was miscast (at least opposite Stephen Moyer). Loved Michael's supporting cast: sister, nephew, Indian friends, sister-in-law. Edie's friends not so much (may say something about my own social milieu) as they seemed much younger, phonier, grungier and a bit hopeless. Good soundtrack. Lastly, speaking of music, I could never believe that Rashida's Edie would be seriously into rock music, while I would easily believe that the Michael character would be, while he was evidently music clueless.

    So--close, but a miss, as statistically most shows are more likely to be. Think the US version that's been done but never released, would probably be not as good, but more successful, like The Office.
  • NY-Lon: New York - London...This groundbreaking new drama series is set in the two great cities and features a passionate love affair spanning 3,000 miles. Innovative, home-grown and contemporary, NY-LON boasts the grand vision of a big screen movie and all the style and energy of the best US drama.

    The first ever UK drama series to be filmed partly on location in New York's Lower East Side and with an exciting transatlantic cast, NY-LON follows the troubled romance between a New York record store clerk, Edie (Rashida Jones), and London stock broker Michael (Stephen Moyer), after their chance meeting in his city.

    As well as having a gripping story line and well created characters, this show boasts cool modern camera work and daring literary techniques.

    Following the couple through the highs and lows of their very modern romance, the intervention of opinionated friends and the inevitable culture clash, NY-LON is a stylish and bold drama event. Do not miss this!
  • I thought the cast did a very good job. The writing and direction seemed to leave something to be desired. The character of Edie was too angry and seemed too distracted to really have any kind of romance going on. Most of the time she came across distant, and her personality came across as rigid, and not compromising. The male lead,Michael, played by the very watchable Stephen Moyer,

    was much more sympathetic, more likable, and more committed to the relationship. I liked the supporting cast.I felt a storyline could have been added for Michael's roommate - at least more than there was. As an American, I was aware of a decided bias toward the London storyline, which was fine with me. The characters were more interesting and just "nicer". The music was enjoyable, and fit well. The locations were well shot. It was certainly a good series, but not a great one. Maybe the lead female character needed another episode to convince me of her sincerity.
  • Warning: Spoilers
    This show feels like it was written by a team of hormonal teenagers. The conversations do not flow, and characters get into fights over insignificant things but then are fine 20 seconds later. The writing is probably the worst I've ever seen, and it absolutely kills this show.

    Characters have contradictory "quirks". Like Michael. He's a money/power-hungry stock broker in London but he is a romantic and willing to sacrifice it all for his nephew or for Edie. Edie works in a used record store and teaches illiterate adults at night; so she's obviously a caring individual with a lot of compassion for the human condition. But she drops it all and abandons her job and one of her students for a weekend in a lame attempt to be "spontaneous".

    Basically, there was no connectivity between events, characters, or episodes.

    This was an okay premise and could have a been a hit, but the writing ruined it.
  • todedina7 February 2007
    In summary: girl meets boy , straitlaced meets hippy dippy , transatlantic snogfest , love blooms in spite of , the true course of love never runs smoothly , heartache , wonder , turmoil , Ecstasy , anguish , elation , protagonists easy on the eye and stonking good music.

    This all happens through the course of various transatlantic jaunts between New York and London. The Major protagonists are a British Banker and an American Record Shop girl / Night school Teacher

    Fabulous ! Although it was aired in the UK on Channel 4 in 2005 and by BBC America in 2005 we are still awaiting the release of the DVD !!!!

    PS: The soundtrack and music from the show are available on CD
  • rusernaim23 October 2021
    Like the friends of the protagonists in the show, I can't tell any reason whatsoever what they see in each other that justifies the depth of their conflict or their supposed connection. That's pretty much game over for a romance.

    The show is more realistic than most about the lifestyle of rocker chicks depicted. Then again that lifestyle is pretty boring, no?
  • This is as it's producers describe: cool with a capital "C". It helps that the entire cast are beautiful, especially Edie, and the two lead roles are played by very talented actors who clearly have a long and successful road ahead of them. I guess this is not aimed at a 30-something audience, but I am enjoying it nonetheless.

    It's a really a joy to see the use of split-screen, largely pioneered by Kiefer Sutherland's '24', and I really enjoy watching events from a number of different characters' points of view.

    The settings of the grungy second-hand NY record store, Michael's docklands loft apartment, Edie's tiny boho NY.flat and the impersonal environment of Michael's overcrowded open-plan City office are all very well thought-out. The character development is also very intelligently planned. I am only onto the third episode, the plot is a bit thin so far, but I have been drawn-in and I hope that it develops with greater depth and complexity over the rest of the series.

    This fascinating piece of television drama reflects the reality of the fact that the world is getting smaller and affairs of the heart are increasingly spanning the globe and there's no stopping it. It also speaks volumes about the need for innovative and creative direction and camera work which can grab the attention of an increasingly critical audience.
  • ...though that's about as far as it goes for this series. The whole program just seemed to scream that the makers desperately wanted it to be the hippest creation EVER and oh-so-cool but the result was flat, anti- drama with little to recommend it. The acting was passable though certainly not electric by any means. Production valued were generally good but the script just tried too hard to be daring and shocking but it's core ended up coming across as simply tepid, lacking in substance and with a negative moral outlook some of the time. I didn't see the whole series, admittedly, but when something starts to simply bore the pants off you there is nothing much left to do but put this series of the shelf and file it under 'dull'.
  • I don't have an awful lot to say about this sorry romantic drama.

    A hugely uninteresting story about a transatlantic romance between two very dull characters.

    Edie is a hard-up yank who has been in a relationship with a complete loser. Michael Antonioni (yes, MICHAEL ANTONIONI) is a hard-working, hard-living obscenely well-paid Brit with a heart of gold under the tough exterior.

    I don't want to be too hard on this fella cos he really is a nice chap (no really, he is) but for a guy in a dynamic, highly paid job where image counts for so much it was something of a mystery why he always wore the same suit that was at least one size too small for him....

    To be honest, from what I saw (because I gave up after episode 4) Rashida Jones was OK as Edie but Stephen Moyer was uncharismatic and simply dreadful as MICHAEL ANTONIONI.

    Some people may admire split-screen drama but ever since watching The Andromeda Strain and The Boston Strangler ages ago, I have always felt that the use of the split-screen is simply a flashy tool with the sole purpose of glossing over a director's inability to edit scenes into a coherent story.

    Ny-Lon used the split screen a great deal and I found this incredibly annoying.

    The romance between the two lead characters fails to convince purely because there is no chemistry at all between the actors leaving viewers totally disinterested in the supposed drama of their love life.

    Worst of all was the embarrassing reference to Italian art-house cinema in the characters names of MICHAEL ANTONIONI and his nephew ANGELO.

    I was almost expecting Michael's chums Frederick Fellini, Bernard Bertolucci, Luke Visconti and Peter Pasolini to be introduced at some point.

    Thankfully this did not happen, at least not in the first four episodes...
  • Right, this programme was quite simply terrible. I mean, just so bad. The leads were totally wooden, had no chemistry and were totally unsympathetic, so the whole will-they-won't-they dynamic never really seemed to matter; these people are so uninteresting and didn't even seem to like each other, so why the hell would any viewer want them to get together? The bloke, however, was at least fairly entertaining to watch, due to the fact that with his abnormally large head, he was obviously a Thunderbird puppet, whose Pinocchio-like wish to become a real boy had been granted... In fact, all the characters are fairly uninspiring, especially the Thunderbird puppet's nephew, who is in the film solely to allow other characters to reveal their sensitive sides. Perhaps if he'd been a baby seal, who made eyes at the camera (with a studio audience obediently 'awww-ing') he would've been more bearable. There were only three characters who actually came across as anything more than insubstantial twats: Macaulay Culkin's ex-wife, who gets her bits out on several occasions; Thunderbird's sister, who actually seems human, rather than a hologram of a pretty person, as the rest of the cast; and Thunderbird's ethnic minority best friend, solely because he was in Teachers and is, in Teachers, a top actor. Apart from these honourable exceptions, the characters are dreadful finger puppet people, anxiously trying to be cool and do cool stuff (never before have I seen so much self-conscious smoking). You can almost imagine most of them lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, as they fret and worry: "Am I cool?" The writers made a real stab at making the people do interesting things, or utter interesting, quotable lines, but these were so obvious, almost signposted, that they just seemed to be trying too hard. Believe it or not, there were actually some small parts of the series that weren't too bad: the music is cracking, though it has obviously been picked to hammer home the fact that the characters are hip, happening, cosmopolitan bright young things. Don't watch this. No, actually do, its very funny. Shame it wasn't a comedy.
  • Warning: Spoilers
    Having experienced a similar transatlantic romance, she in NJ and I in Manchester (not so cool maybe?) I enjoyed this immensely and saw lots of parallels. All that aside, the ups and downs of Michael and Edie's relationship keep you coming back for more in this arresting 7 part drama.

    Look out spoiler ahead: Unfortunately, the will they won't they roller-coaster ride ends in such an unsatisfactory manner - you are left feeling empty and unfulfilled - perhaps much like the central characters. I imagine the lackluster ending sets the scene for a sequel - which would be a shame, because I feel there's no way you could continue the story without diminishing the feel, intrigue and impact of this original piece of work.