The 10th of Netflix’s 14-book deal with the author starts slowly and features some desperate dialogue, though once it gets going it’s entertaining – if forgettable
Ten down, four to go. I approach each new adaptation of a Harlan Coben thriller under his 14-book deal with Netflix as a weary traveller on a very long journey – committed to reaching the final destination and grateful every time that we are closer to the end.
It has been a funny old business, this deal. The adaptations have been churned out in a manner reminiscent of the old studio system – fast, efficiently and apparently with any actors free at the moment of casting and with little time to spare for making them stand up to great scrutiny. Or perhaps they are more like the Catherine Cookson dramas that flooded the 90s television schedules and whose formulaic pleasures can still be found when you are off sick, or otherwise in need of comfort (along with the chance to spot now-star actors in embryonic form). Coben’s are darker and more bloody, but the promise is the same: viewers will get exactly what they came for and go away content.
So, to No 10 in the Coben-Netflix venture, Missing You. Our protagonist is DI Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) – feisty, good at her job but terminally single since her fiance, Josh (Ashley Walters), left her, without a word of explanation, 11 years ago. Her father, Clint, played by Lenny Henry, who was also on the force, was murdered by a hitman, Monte (Marc Warren). Coben regular Richard Armitage is her boss, DCI Ellis Stagger (this is his name in the book, so perhaps there was nothing to be done). Donovan has two narratively important friends, private investigator Stacey (Jessica Plummer) and Josh’s former flatmate and close friend Aqua (Mary Malone).
Add to this a man (played by Rudi Dharmalingam) running for his life over the moors. He is eventually caught, stripped, given an orange jumpsuit and chained up in a farm’s outbuilding – which might be an esoteric spa experience or team-building corporate awayday, I suppose, but on the whole suspect not. Then there’s a missing blonde woman (Lisa Faulkner); a prison nurse (Samantha Spiro – always so good at suggesting the ordinary woman who is ready to snap at any moment) prepared to inject the hitman with some form of truth serum she seems to have invented so Kat can illegally question him on his deathbed about her father’s murder; Steve Pemberton effortlessly creating another terrifying weirdo to give us all sleepless nights; and James Nesbitt hovering on the horizon as Monte’s boss. We’ve really plenty to be getting on with.
Which makes it all the stranger – especially when you consider the source material, which is always propulsive – that it adheres once more to the flawed template the previous efforts have followed. The first episode or two is largely wheel-spinning. Kat tells three different people the same information three different times, when we’ve such a lot to get through! Stop it! We all understood the first time the very simple point that your boyfriend left you without warning. We do not need to waste time on Stacey telling you/us that “He hurt you. Badly” nor force the poor actor through lines as terrible as: “You shut yourself down and turned off love like it was a hate crime.” Nor do we need people to keep saying: “Wait, what are you saying?” when what they have said is abundantly clear.
Nevertheless, after the first weirdly repetitive opening episodes, the mission finds its feet and matters begin to twist, turn and improve. Mysteries deepen, nasty secrets are uncovered, treachery (or apparent treachery) and revelations abound and you’re wholly addicted once more. You won’t remember a thing about it 10 minutes after the credits roll, but that’s OK. You know the puzzle got solved and you had fun. What more do you need?
