Nesh Pillay was a vibrant single mom who had just started dating JJ Jakope when she lost her short term memory and couldn’t remember anything about him or the last few years of her life. 50,000 First Dates: A True Story on Prime Video is the story of their relationship and Nesh’s quest for answers about the brain injury she suffered as a child that caused her to forget some of the most important people and memories in her life as an adult.
Opening Shot: “I have a crazy story,” the voice of a podcast host says as we watch intimate home videos of a man and woman who seem to be in love. The podcast host continues, “Have you seen the movie 50 First Dates? She’s a real life 50 First Dates person.”
The Gist: In case you’ve (no pun intended) forgotten, 50 First Dates is the 2004 rom-com starring Drew Barrymore as Lucy, a woman with short-term memory loss who can’t remember ever meeting the man she’s been going on a series of dates with, played by Adam Sandler. The film’s premise seems pretty far-fetched, but a version of it actually happened to a woman named Nesh Pillay, a single mom from Toronto, in 2022. Nesh had just started dating JJ Jakope, an Austrian man she met on Tinder, and one day after waking up from a nap, when she spotted him in her apartment she had no idea who he was and assumed he was her Uber driver. Nesh had lost her entire short term memory and thought she was living in 2008.
JJ immediately called Nesh’s sisters and they took her to a hospital where she received a CT scan that turned up nothing. She was released and told that her memory loss would subside in a few days, but days turned into weeks and months and she continued to wake up unsure about who she was. Even worse, she couldn’t recognize her own family, including her young daughter. The entire ordeal was recorded, usually by JJ, who would chronicle moments in their lives for posterity but also with the hopes that seeing video of herself would help Nesh regain her memory.
The show flips back and forth addressing nearly everything about Nesh’s situation almost stream-of-consciously. In comparing Nesh and JJ’s relationship to a rom-com, there’s a whole segment of the first episode dedicated to her favorite rom-coms, the names of which she struggles to remember. Another segment addresses a childhood head injury Nesh experienced as the result of a car crash that is like likely reason behind a long-dormant brain trauma. That, compounded by numerous other occasions where Nesh hit her head over the years, has led doctors to believe that’s the cause of her memory loss.
But not everyone in the medical world believed Nesh – her story was often inconsistent on account of her inability to recall details, and many doctors thought her issue was psychological rather than physical. The show offers insight into all of this, from accusations of Nesh’s “faking” it to JJ’s role as a caregiver in her life – a role he assumed so quickly after meeting her that it’s hard not to be skeptical why he gave up so much to care for a near-stranger 24-7. While their unorthodox love story is at the heart of this special and it would be amazing if this was a story of love overcoming the odds, it feels rushed and obvious that their relationship is still very much a work in progress.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the show shares some obvious similarities with 50 First Dates, I’m also reminded of Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare, another fascinating real-life story that was turned into a TV series recently, but failed to really capture the right tone.
Our Take: 50,000 First Dates somehow feels both incredibly comprehensive and incredibly superficial. Much of Nesh and JJ’s story is told by video recorded on JJ’s phone over the past two years, or through the TikTok videos Nesh posted to an account she crated to chronicle her story. Many of the scenes cover serious issues: brain injuries, therapy, and past traumas, but the tone throughout remains oddly fun and upbeat in a way that feels confusing as a viewer. (It also feels oddly voyeuristic to be watching so many intimate videos of Nesh recorded as she is in her bed, struggling to understand who is with her or where she is, or video that was taken, somehow, during a couples therapy session between Nesh and JJ.
There’s an awful lot to cover about Nesh’s story, and yet the story is told in a non-linear way that feels scattered. The show touches on most of the big questions we as an audience might have about this story, while Nesh and JJ’s relationship always has an air of fragility. The two became engaged even while she suffered daily memory lapses, something that feels hard to understand. JJ comes off as a truly well-intentioned man, it’s not that his actions seem predatory, they’re just inexplicable. He gave up his whole life to care for a woman he just met, a woman who had no idea who he was day in and day out. He is described as a natural problem solver and a caregiver, but the timeline of events feels so rushed that it’s hard to make sense of the romance of it all, especially after watching footage of a disoriented Nesh struggling to comprehend who she is.
The two episodes feel like an assemblage of a couple of different human interest stories you might see on a TV news magazine; one about the romance between JJ and Nesh, another about the root causes behind Nesh’s memory loss. I’m not sure if the two hour-long episodes here were absolutely necessary to tell this story, and it is a fascinating story, it just feels as though two hours was a daunting amount of time to fill and this would have worked better as a segment on 60 Minutes.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: “Every great rom-com should end in a wedding…to make it a bit exciting, because we both love adventures, we should do it on a Vespa,” JJ says, and Nesh adds, “And the credits will roll. That’s a wrap.” And then we watch footage of the two of them driving off on a Vespa as the credits roll.
Memorable Dialogue: “I’m just honored to be compared to Adam Sandler,” JJ jokes when the story of Nesh’s life is compared to the movie 50 First Dates.
Our Call: Nesh Pillay’s story is still being figured out. She and her brain might spend years as the subjects of medical studies, and her relationship with JJ might ebb and flow. But this show feels like it has rushed to create a tidy timeline and a concise narrative for something very complicated and ever-changing. As fascinating a story as this is, the storytelling itself feels inconsistent and unsure of itself. SKIP IT.
Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.
