One Day team on why they didn't change the ending

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Netflix's One Day.

We know what you're thinking, and yes, Emma Morley was always going to die.

When David Nicholls' novel One Day came out in 2009, fans quickly fell in love with the story of Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley, two best friends who spent 20 years together, sometimes fighting and pretty much always falling in love. As the story checked in with them one day each year, readers rooted for them to get together. And eventually, they did! The two were married, and all of the fights seemed worth it. Until one day, Emma was hit by a car while she was riding her bike. And then, she died.

"Some people think it's a terrible, terrible thing to do in that kind of novel, that it breaks the genre in a way that's frustrating for readers," Nicholls tells EW. "So I'm aware that for some people it feels like a trick or cheating or something. To me, it was the starting point of the novel. So the novel is about a day that seems ordinary. Why are we seeing this day? It's a pretty eventful day, but why aren't we seeing the day they get married? Why aren't we seeing them at Christmas? Why aren't we seeing all of these other things, which they talk about? Oh, the reason we're seeing this day is because of this." 

It's the idea, as Emma (Ambika Mod) reads to Dexter (Leo Woodall) in the finale of the Netflix series, of someone having both a birthday and a death day. "That was always the premise. It's a novel about someone's death day, but you don't tell them because none of us know," Nicholls says. "And so it's always been central to the premise."

That's why lead writer and executive producer Nicole Taylor ultimately decided to stay true to the book's ending with the series. Although, she'd like you to know she thought about keeping Emma alive.

"I interrogated it fully. I felt that was necessary," Taylor says. "I didn't feel under any pressure to change the ending or to keep the ending. I just wanted to reinterview it for its place in the piece." And yet, her conclusion was that it was an important piece of Dexter and Emma's story. "Once you pull that out, you better have something just as good, if not better, in terms of the meaning of the piece as a whole and the cosmic enduring nature of love and friendship and how your whole life can be defined by a chance."

One Day is available on Netflix now.

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