Type: Romantic
Film | Show: Blindspotting
Featured Characters: Ashley Rose and Miles Turner
In more ways than one, Blindspotting is a love story. It’s a love story between friends and family members, and it’s the love story between a man and a woman with unparalleled loyalty to one another. Both the Starz series and the original film from the creative minds of Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal tackle heavy topics dealing with race, abandonment, loss, and the complex natures of humanity. Through poetry and methodic movements with thoughtful choreographies, the series adds nuance and depth to both characters and relationships, making it a unique gem in the innovative world of media.
Ashley Rose and Miles Turner’s relationship is the primary love story in Starz’s series, and it’s one of the most breathtaking displays of best friends in a relationship. While we don’t get their initial meet cute in the film, there’s not much we miss out on when it comes to their relationship because the lived-in adoration that’s present becomes the story’s anchor. There are few fictional couples that we can sit here and gush about for hours, showering them with a sea of compliments because words just don’t seem to be enough, and it’s easy to want to use all of them to express the love that we see between them. Whether it’s their distinctive loyalty, transparent means of communication, or their innately brilliant love for one another, Miles and Ashley are a worthy fictional couple to place faith in.
Ashley Rose and Miles Turner’s Romance Defines Loyalty
If you’d ever told me I’d write about a couple with cheating in their story and still harp on their steadfast loyalty, I wouldn’t have believed you. But Blindspotting consistently subverts expectations beautifully, reminding viewers to embrace the grey areas because human beings are too complex for their narrative arcs to only ever be black or white. Further, within those grey areas come the desperate moments where missing each other runs so deep that Ashley makes a mistake she believes she can’t return from. Despite it being the final few moments in the season, their montage exhibits their relationship like a stunning tapestry.
I’ve written about Blindspotting’s Season 2 before, and one of the most prominent displays of Miles Turner and Ashley Rose’s relationship is in the scene where they make amends again. In that feature, I’d said: “There’s no dialogue in the present day apart from Miles’ “Come back to me now,” and the beauty at that moment thus mirrors their enduring trust for one another. Their body language and physicality reaffirm this, once again imploring the audience to pay attention to the performances. No moment is meaningless or stagnant. And this detail is precisely why Miles’ words are so perfect. Come back to me now echoes much, but it fundamentally speaks to Ashley’s guilt. It speaks to the broken parts of both of them, stuck in the past, wandering away from the reality they could step towards. It cements his faith in her and confirms that he understands where she’s leaping toward with her decisions. He knows she loves him in the same way that he loves her.
Isolated at the start of the new year, in an attic above everyone else, and focused solely on themselves, it’s a renewal of sorts—a promise to get back to the place they were before the darkness overtakes. It’s a promise reiterated through fireworks, with their son running in to reassure them that this little family can be stronger than before. Blindspotting Season 2 is all about Miles and Ashley navigating through their marriage, and it does so through the kind of memorable reconciliation that’s effectively captivating. I can’t remember the last time I held my breath through a montage like this, proving that so much of what this show does is a brilliant tapestry of human complexities that orbit around love.”
If Season 1 is about Ashley learning to have difficult conversations and raise their son while Miles is behind bars, then Season 2 is about how they navigate through their marriage and the promises they make to one another every single day. As a couple who’s been together for 12 years, Miles Turner and Ashley Rose know one another better than anyone else does, but at the same time, there’s great beauty in how they continue to grow, both individually and as a couple. The short journey that we get with them centers their relationship around tumultuous difficulties that challenge them as a couple while helping them become better versions of themselves. We see them not only make promises, but we watch them ceaselessly fight to keep them treasured somewhere safe that nothing and no one can touch.
The show does this especially well by presenting a physical distance between them in order to show how fervent their adoration truly is because they withstand the hardships that attempt to drag them down. The intimacy we get in their quiet conversations and loud declarations is, in every way, incredibly unique to the series and romances on TV.
Further, when discussing their wedding scene during the Season 1 finale, I wrote, “Rafael Casal and Jasmine Cephas Jones are unmatched. The chemistry is so substantial that every spoken word feels like an intimate dance we’re intruding on. A gift we shouldn’t be given—something that’s solely meant to be shared between Miles and Ashley, and yet, here we are. Front and center as the audience (and their family), watching a proposal that feels so personal, it’s otherworldly of sorts. Their love for one another is so magnetic, it’s transportive, it’s magical, it’s downright so beautiful even amidst its imperfections, the promises linger in the air just as they’re all carried away.”
So much of the reason that Miles Turner and Ashely Rose stand out as a couple is because both Casal and Cephas Jones care tremendously about their characters and the places they take them. The heart and meaning they lace all their scenes with make the bond we see feel much more authentic and memorable. It’s been a while, but Ashley’s “I just miss you. You’re my person” is still one of the most haunting displays of love I’ve ever watched on TV—talk about a ghost story, their wholesome display of it in “Ghost Dad” remains one of the best episodes on TV.
And that’s just it—Miles and Ashley are each other’s person—complete on their own but significantly better together because of the love they give one another. They know how to talk to one another and understand each other even when there are no words. They know how to be together through perilous circumstances because they rise to the top every time they are tested. They’re each other’s person because they choose to love one another more and more with every passing day, and, perhaps, more importantly, they choose to trust and believe in each other. And it’s that very belief that allows the other person to be their best self. Their faith in one another enables them to be better parents, siblings, partners, and people.
It’s a heartbreaking shame Blindspotting was canceled, but in the short period we spend with Miles and Ashley, we bear witness to a love that’s so meticulously well-written that it deserves all the praise it gets. We watch something magnetically profound grace our screens every time they’re together. And it’s a testament to a team that cares about storytelling that’s deeply meaningful in how it represents complex humans finding love and a safe place together.