Wet Nose Films · Television drama series · Present day · Working title · In early development
Eight years in the life of a girl nobody looks at closely, because she keeps giving them such good reasons not to.
At twelve she is in love with her best friend and her best friend’s boyfriend at the same time, and she is certain this makes her the problem, because love is the only word anyone has ever given her for what she feels.
She is twelve. She loves her best friend. She also loves her best friend’s boyfriend. She reads both as love because love is the only word she has been handed; it is unnamed to her, and it is really lust.
Wanting two people at once feels to her like proof that something is wrong with her. It is not. But there is no adult in her life who will ever say so.
Just Another Day follows her from twelve to nineteen. The same confusion plays differently at every age, and the series moves with her rather than looking back at her.
The cause stays underneath. It is never on screen.
She was sexually abused. The series never depicts it and never stages it as revelation. It surfaces sideways: through her body, in fragments that arrive during intimate experiences she has at fourteen, out of order and without explanation.
The audience is never made a spectator to the event. What the audience gets is the shape of the thing from the outside: a girl reacting to something the show will not show them, in a life where nobody asks.
No depiction. No flashback to the act. The subject is carried entirely by aftermath and physical response, and the camera stays with her face rather than her body. An intimacy coordinator and a trauma consultant are budgeted from the pilot, not added at production. The young lead is cast across the eight-year span with the duty-of-care plan written before the schedule.
At ten she gets her first kiss that she actually wanted. The boy was dating someone else, and she did not know.
The first time she chooses something for herself, it comes back as shame. She blames herself.
That beat rhymes with the triangle at twelve, and the rhyme is the engine: wanting anything at all has already been established, in her own head, as evidence against her. No adult ever tells her otherwise. Nobody sees her.
She is very good at school. Clear rules, a task, a score at the end. The opposite of everything else in her life. She is “the bright one” straight through.
Every A is another reason for nobody to look closer.
The achievement is the camouflage. It is also, genuinely, the thing keeping her alive, which is what makes it unbearable when it runs out.
Before the series. He was someone else’s. She decides it was her fault, and keeps the ruling.
In love with her best friend and the best friend’s boyfriend. Reads it as love. Reads it as proof.
Intimate experiences bring fragments she cannot place. Nothing is explained, least of all to her.
School is working. She is winning at the only game with published rules, and it is holding.
She and the best friend go as each other’s date, despite living in two different cities by then.
School has ended. The structure is gone. We do not learn whether she lives.
At nineteen she overdoses, and the series does not tell us whether she survives it.
The ambiguity is deliberate and it is load-bearing. The show refuses to explain her at the end because it never explained her to herself. What it means on its own terms: sometimes you don’t have to understand.
The spine, stated plainly: the thing that saves her for eight years is the thing that cannot save her once it ends.
Commercially, the unanswered ending is leverage. It leaves a feature on the table for anyone who wants the answer, without the series owing them one.
Language she does not have for feelings she does have. Every misnaming compounds.
Being good is not the same as being fine, and adults consistently cannot tell the difference.
Not malice. Ordinary inattention, distributed across a dozen well-meaning people over eight years.
The show withholds the tidy account, because the tidy account was never available to her.
The best friend almost sees her. How close she gets is the dial the whole series turns on. If she nearly does and lets it go, prom hurts considerably more. Season structure follows from that: eight years in one season, or a season per stretch.
Wet Nose Films
Daniela Barbosa · Creator and Producer
Twenty years as a 1st Assistant Director · DGC and DGA
info@wetnosefilms.ca