Stream It Or Skip It: ‘If Only’ On Netflix, Where A Divorcing Woman Gets To Relive 2008 As Her 2018 Self

Time travel conceits, like what we see in the new Netflix drama If Only, get tricky because the person doing the time travel not only has to deal with the mind-bending fact that he or she knows about things that are about to happen that everyone else does not, but the whole “butterfly effect” thing, where changes they make affect the outcomes of many, many lives. Maybe the characters are so charming they overcome some time-hopping plot holes. But that’s not always the case. Does this new Spanish series manage to navigate this tricky landscape?

IF ONLY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A couple make out, and start down the road of having some hot, romantic sex. Then we pan back and see that’s a scene from a movie on TV, watched by a teary woman on one sofa and a sleeping man on the other.

The Gist: It’s July 25, 2018. Emma (Megan Montaner) and Nando (Miquel Fernández) are the couple having this decidedly unromantic evening. She ends up throwing the remote at him and telling him to go snore in the bedroom. What we don’t realize is that it’s a) their wedding anniversary, and b) she just asked him for a divorce.

Emma has been unsatisfied with her marriage and life for awhile. “Years go by, all of us grow up, and I became a woman, but I’m not half the woman I was,” she tells her best friend Deme (Eduardo Lloveras), who is dating Isa (Jael Pascual), who works with Nando and is also one of Emma’s closest friends. She and Deme never dated, but there is definitely something between them that’s more than just friendship.

She thinks back to August 23, 2008, when Nando asked him to marry her. They had taken a break and he had dated someone else for a few months, but after the break, he felt he was ready to commit. Ten years later, they have 9-year-old twins that seem to favor him over her, he has a belly, and all the love is gone.

A rare “blood moon” lunar eclipse is happening that night, and Emma is going to join Nando and all of their friends at the same restaurant where he proposed to her. At some point, though, as she looks up at the moon and makes her blood moon wish, something changes. She’s back in her old car, wearing the outfit she wore on that night in ’08. She’s back in 2008, only with the foreknowledge gained by a decade with Nando.

At the restaurant, she decides to turn Nando down, mentioning things like their kids and their life together, which of course makes Nando look at her like she’s hit her head or something equally strange. She feels great that she’s somehow recaptured her old life and short-circuited her miserable marriage, but there are other implications to this trip back in time.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of?  If Only (original title: Si lo hubiera sabido) has a distinct 13 Going On 30 feel, though in this case, it would likely be more like 40 going on 30 (or 30 going on 20, if the description of the show is accurate).

Our Take: We’re not completely sure If Only, created by Irma Correa and Ece Yörenç, is able to handle the trickiness of its time-travel conceit, but then again, we only see 2018 Emma navigating 2008 for the last ten minutes of the episode. Montaner does a good job of showing just how miserable Emma is, though we don’t quite see enough evidence from Nando or her kids about why things have become so miserable. We know that Emma recently lost her father, which is also why she’s wondering about the rest of her life. But does her misery just stem from forgetting about who she was, and that she and Nando have grown apart? Or is there something else going on?

What we do know is that this isn’t a Sliding Doors-style scenario, where if one tiny thing didn’t happen, Emma’s life would be completely different. The change is huge — she turns Nando’s proposal down — and the changes are going to be obvious, including Emma dating a man named Ruben (Michel Noher). We see Ruben in the first episode; he’s the guy who Emma almost hits with her car on the way to the restaurant in both ’18 and ’08. How the two of them will connect is still up in the air, but Emma’s detachment from Nando will set her down the path to meet him, which should be interesting.

But she also has to deal with the fact that her kids aren’t there and now won’t exist because she turned Nando down, and the home they lived in as a family hasn’t been built yet. Will all of these implications be explored, or will this just be a straightforward romantic story? How will 2018 Emma navigate the world in 2008 Emma’s body? Those answers will determine how engaging If Only turns out to be.

Sex and Skin: Nothing beyond that first scene that Emma and Nando watch on TV.

Parting Shot: Emma calls her mom, and is shocked to her her father in the background of the call. This is when she realizes she’s not in a dream.

Sleeper Star: Jael Pascual plays Isa, and it seems like the relationship she has with Nando and Emma is muddled at best; it does seem that in the alternate version of 2008, she’ll have a much different role in Emma’s life.

Most Pilot-y Line: When Emma and Nando’s twins find out that their parents are getting a divorce, the boy is elated. “I’ll finally get my own room!” How does he know that?

Our Call: STREAM IT. If Only is intriguing, but a bit unsure of itself in its first episode. How it manages its time-travel theme and its implications will go a long way to determining whether the series is a worth viewers’ time.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.