20 years ago, Channel 4’s NY-LON captured a different era of long-distance relationships

Everyone has a thorny relationship with nostalgia, and that’s just the way it should be. If memories of bygone eras don’t hit with one-part longing, one-part embarrassment, were you truly present? This is the way I think about the 2000s, anyway. Memories of the good times are caught up in a Greco-Roman wrestling match with feelings of mortification about the terrible jeans.

Some time ago, an arbitrary memory from 2004 pinged into my brain. I remembered ads for a Channel 4 series titled NY-LON. Billed as a “transatlantic romance”, it depicted the long-distance relationship between a New York girl and London guy (the NY and LON of the title). Investigating the show years later, I discovered that the American half of the couple was played by Rashida Jones, a few years before roles in the US version of The Office and movie The Social Network increased her profile; while the co-lead role was handed to Stephen Moyer, who later enjoyed a long stint on True Blood. Though NY-LON has largely been forgotten, it didn’t get lost in time – you can watch today via Channel 4’s video on demand service or YouTube, offering the opportunity for late discovery.

Watching the seven episodes almost two decades later, the whole thing scans as terribly 2000s. Created and written by two fresh voices at the time – Simon Burke and Anya Camilleri – NY-LON has aged in a way that’s only possible when a production attempts to crowbar its way into the cultural zeitgeist. The soundtrack is loaded with then-fashionable indie artists: The Dandy Warhols, Elbow, Damien Rice, The Rapture, The Thrills – even Radiohead signed off on a couple of songs.

With its relationship troubles in a young hipster-cool world, movies such as Singles and High Fidelity are the most obvious analogues. Jones’s character Edie even works in a record store. But the hook, as described by Channel 4, is that NY-LON depicts “a very modern long-distance love affair”. Music and fashion always evolve, but it’s more interesting to consider how long-distance relationships have changed in the 20 years since NY-LON aired.

The saga begins when Edie meets Michael (Moyer), a stockbroker slickster, while on a trip to London. Both lead lives full of common problems and thorny relations with friends, family and lingering lovers. In spite of – or, maybe, because of – these complexities, and though they live an ocean apart, the pair decide to progress their impulsive romance to a more serious relationship.

Michael doesn’t particularly like phone calls because they remind him of work. “I hate email,” says Edie. “I think if you have something to say to someone you should just say it.” So their relationship strengthens through regular whirlwind visits.

The show perhaps downplays the reality of long-distance travel. There are no shots of the characters hanging around airports or being squeezed onto airplanes. Sometimes they simply switch cities scene-to-scene, as though transported via some kind of sci-fi technology.

Regular trips across the Atlantic are a tough undertaking. This hasn’t drastically changed in 20 years, nor is it likely to soon. But watching NY-LON today, it’s striking how much technology has evolved to ease that burden.

There’s actually limited data out there suggesting that long-distance relationships are on the rise, but there seems to be a consensus among experts that they are. “Nobody can really say with certainty that this lifestyle is more prevalent than it has been in the past, but everybody who studies this topic agrees that it probably is,” Danielle Lindemann, a sociologist at Lehigh University in the US, old the BBC in 2019 when discussing couples living apart due to their careers. It’s not difficult to discern why we’d feel more comfortable with romances that are largely played out at a distance. As we were reminded during COVID-19 restrictions, technology has lessened the necessity to interact with each other in person.

In practical terms, maintaining a long-distance relationship once risked your phone bill being an absolute mess – and despite Michael’s lack of enthusiasm for phone conversations, Edie does run up a $1,000 charge. Today, we have voice-over-IP services like WhatsApp that don’t use a bill-per-minute business model. You can talk all day and all night without incurring any additional costs.

An interesting analogue to Edie and Michael’s union is Pam and Jim’s relationship in The Office, which happened just a few years later. During a period of working in different cities, the couple buy miniature Bluetooth devices so they can stay in touch throughout the day without being caught by their bosses. It’s an early depiction of people spending extremely long periods of time in each other’s company despite being apart.

Today, there are numerous video call apps and other platforms that foster different forms of online engagement. Couples can watch TV together on websites that allow them to share a screen. “It’s almost like being in the same room together,” one-half of a long distance partnership told The Atlantic of simultaneous streaming. On the 2021 podcast, Sweet Bobby, catfished subject Kirat Assi describes falling asleep with her supposed boyfriend on Skype, such is the level of connection that can be felt through digital portals. This comfort with feeling intimate without the physical reaches its most obvious final destination when you consider that, over the last few years, various studies have suggested Gen Z are having less sex than previous generations.

Why wouldn’t people be more comfortable with long-distance relationships when many new romances are struck up from a distance? Dating and hook-up apps have become a core tool in meeting potential partners. A UK report based on data from dating website eHarmony and birth rate projections found that 32% of relationships started between 2015 and 2019 began online, compared to 19% between 2005 and 2014. Anecdotally, this feels like a conservative estimate.

Catfishing itself, a term that describes when a person engages another through a fake persona, has been an unfortunate side effect of this trend. The origin of the expression comes from the documentary Catfish, which charted the uncovering of a fake that began Facebook. (And Facebook was created just one year before NY-LON aired.)

All this points to a contemporary version of NY-LON being much different than the original. I doubt a remake is on the cards, but here’s a lot to admire about the show. Though it’s a British production, it’s shot across both the UK and US, ensuring it has a feeling of authenticity, and never leans on obvious culture clash gags, instead focusing on universal themes of human connection. Still, the dialogue can be a bit trite: “This girl Edie,” says a friend of Michael. “Y’know, maybe, just maybe, she’s the one for you. And you’ve just got to go and find out.”

The supporting cast is not stacked with particularly engaging actors (look out for Olivia Colman’s one-scene appearance, though) and a lot of plotlines are left hanging in the wind, as though the producers were certain of a second series. This was not to be. NY-LON landed with a thud. The drop-off in viewing figures from the first and second episode was enormous, and it failed to overcome such appointment telly as, um, Tarrant on TV and a CSI repeat. Still, today it’s a historic cache, not just of decent tunes, but how we once navigated being in romances across different time zones.