YMMV / Night and Day

• Adorkable: Tom Brake, for the most part. Introduced to viewers by his cousin Jane with the line: "Still a virgin, Tom?", he's a sweet, sensitive boy who fits many of the traditional geeky stereotypes - social awkwardness, academic brightness, braces, and a camcorder perpetually glued to his palm. Subverted later in the series once he loses his virginity, and turns into a bit of a player.
• Commitment Anxiety: May well have suffered from this. For most viewers, soap opera is something you can dip in and out of while you're putting the tea on, because storylines come and go, and no one character is indispensable. One week it might be all Gail Platt, which nobody wants; so you might take up crochet for a few days and wait till the Grimshaws are back on. (Or vice versa.) Not so with a show like Night and Day, which demands not only that viewers turn on each week, but that they pay reasonably close attention. Character motivations and plot points are often glossed over or otherwise obscure - sometimes seemingly for stylistic reasons, and other times as a result of the condensed omnibus, which would often by necessity do away with scenes from the daytime version that provided helpful, if not crucial, context. Commissioning a soap with an indefinitely drawn-out mystery at its core, and in two slightly different formats running parallel to one another, was a bold move by ITV, and evidently one that spectacularly failed to pay dividends for them. Pitched not as an ongoing soap, but as an hour-long, weekly prime-time drama comprising, say, a quarter of the omnibus-length episodes that eventually aired, it might have gained decent ratings and been recommissioned for three more series. Or even more.
• Ho Yay:
  • Josh and Ryan in spades, to the extent that it's difficult to imagine it's not deliberate. Ryan frequently gets very close to Josh's face when he's insulting him. At one point Ryan orders Josh (as part of his debt to Ryan for saving his life) to tell Della he'd rather spend time with Ryan than her, and Josh ends up shouting: 'I want to be with Ryan!' Later, Josh allows himself a little smile when Ryan asks him to 'show me' how to kiss; and did he really need to practice on Josh's arm when he'd already enjoyed a fairly intense snog with Celeste? Then there's Josh's rendition to Ryan of 'I'd do anything; for you, dear, anything...' Not to forget the magic carpet dream sequence where Genie Josh, trapped in the lamp, repeatedly implores Ryan to 'rub me'.
  • Sam and Dennis to a lesser extent. Owing purely to restricted living circumstances they share a bed throughout most of the series - and occasionally one of them wakes up on top of the other, resulting in awkwardness aplenty.
• Jerkass Woobie: Ryan, and arguably Rachel too. Both seem to delight in being absolutely vile to everyone they know, but neither is deprived of moments of vulnerability or humanity. Ultimately, they have loneliness in common. In-universe, Josh recognises both of them as Jerkass Woobies and befriends both in an attempt to encourage them to be better people. That's until he himself goes nuts and gets demon-eyes.
• Retroactive Recognition: Georgina Walker would later play Polly in the Hollyoaks spin-off Hollyoaks: In the City.

---