Many of Harlan Coben’s thrillers seem to have similar structures: A cop or other detective seems to be seeing a dead spouse or someone important in their lives happens to come back into it, setting off a series of twists that reveals a larger conspiracy. The event that sparks those twists is always intriguing, which is what draws you into both the novels and the adaptations Coben has produced with Netflix. The latest adaptation, based on Harlan Coben’s 2014 novel Missing You, is a perfect example of this structure.
MISSING YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A man rides on a horse in twilight, thinking about a woman named Vanessa (GK Barry). He’s then thrown from that horse.
The Gist: We then cut to a restaurant, where Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) is on a date with a lunkhead. She’s ready to go back to her place for some meaningless sex when she fields a call from her friends Stacey (Jessica Plummer) and Aqua (Mary Malone). During that call, she hears a tussle and finds herself in a restaurant kitchen, telling a cook to put a knife down. After she subdues him, her date comes over and finds out she’s not a flight attendant, but a police detective.
DI Donovan works in the missing persons unit, and when she gets to work the next day, her coworker Nia Emine (Catherine Ayers) talks to her about a new case: Rishi Magari (Rudi Dharmalingam). Her boss, DCI Ellis Stagger (Richard Armitage), introduces her to Charlie Pitts (Charlie Hamblett), a new tech specialist. Right away, Charlie does a search on Kat, and finds out that her father Clint (Lenny Henry) was killed in the line of duty 11 years ago, with professional assassin Monte Leburne (Marc Warren) getting life for the murder.
Stacey encourages Kat to use the music-oriented dating app that she signed up for; as Kat lazily swipes left, she is shocked when she comes across a familiar face: Her ex-fiancé Josh Buchanan (Ashley Walters), who was the love of her life. He left without even a note 11 years prior, right at the time Kat needed him most, as it was shortly after her father was murdered.
As Kat debates getting back in touch, she finds out from Stagger that Leburne is dying of cancer, and might only have a few days left. Kat insists that she goes to visit him and get answers about who hired him to kill her father, but everyone tells her to let it go. But with the help of Stacey, a private investigator who helps flush out cheating spouses, she manages to visit the killer at his bedside. With the help of his nurse, Sally (Samantha Spiro), Kat shockingly finds out that Leburne’s involvement was different than she thought.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Missing You has the same feel as Fool Me Once, another recent Harlan Coben adaptation on Netflix.
Our Take: Like most of the Coben adaptations that have streamed on Netflix, whether they were created in the UK or elsewhere in Europe, Missing You is full of twists and turns. In fact, there are a couple of big twists right at the end of the first episode. Here’s the thing, though: Those twists are ones that could be seen coming a mile away, and we’re not sure where writer Victoria Asare-Archer is going to concentrate the story.
It feels like a few disparate threads in Kat’s life — her dating life, Josh’s return, and the impending death of her father’s killer — are all going to be connected somehow, and that’s a feeling we got throughout the first episode. After all, it didn’t seem to be a coincidence that Josh left Kat shortly after her father’s death; she and her friends chalked it up to Josh just being a coldhearted bastard who left Kat when she was most vulnerable, but the timing of it raised red flags in our head.
It also feels like some of the extraneous characters we’re seeing in the first episode, like Stagger, Charlie, and even the missing Richi, are going to be connected to some grander conspiracy somehow. Otherwise, they all feel like distractions in a story that should really zero in on the connection between Josh and the death of Kat’s father.
We enjoyed Eleazar as the strong-but-wounded Kat, who has decided over the past 11 years not to get hurt again, so she keeps things casual with men like the guy she was dating in the first scene. Her memories of being with Josh are still pleasant despite the way it ended; a central memory she has is the two of them singing the John Waite song “Missing You” at a karaoke night. The entire cast is strong, which is a hallmark of the Coben adaptations — a few, like Armitage, have been in more than one of them — and their performances usually make the at times absurd twists in these stories more palatable. That’s what we expect to see here.
Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After finding out some shocking news about both Leburne and Josh, Kat sees a response from Josh in the dating app saying it’s best if they don’t talk.
Sleeper Star: For some reason, we have a feeling that Mary Malone’s character Aqua has more to do with Josh leaving than just being Kat’s supportive BFF.
Most Pilot-y Line: The ’80s music motif is pretty strong on this show; each episode is named after an ’80s hit, and the wording that the music-based dating app uses are groaners. It’s a little strange, given that most of the main characters were either babies or toddlers in the ’80s or weren’t even born yet.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Missing You is a solid thriller that may have you shaking your head at some of its twists. But good performances and an intriguing premise will make some of those silly twists easier to take.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
