I was surprised to learn this week that Harlan Coben, the literary supervillain behind steaming piles of straight-to-streaming schlock like Fool Me Once and Run Away, is actually American. His books are set on US soil, at least, but for some reason their enormously successful TV adaptations have been almost universally set in Britain, take place in suburban abodes with a touch of Privet Drive, and are seemingly cast by the same person who runs the Love of Huns Instagram account (Michelle Keegan as a traumatised fighter pilot? Why not).
They also just feel British. And by that I mean atrocious, like something that would once have been tossed onto Channel 5’s afternoon schedules to appease the senile, but now dominate the Netflix top 10 for seemingly six months out of every year. Remember when everything on TV wasn’t so irredeemably stupid?
Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You, released today, is a rare English-language Coben adaptation that actually takes place in the US. It’s not the first: that was Shelter, a thriller about a missing teenager, but nobody watched it in 2023, possibly because it was a Prime Video original, possibly because the most recognisable name in its cast was Frenchy from Grease. Harben Corlan’s I Will Find You is a far glossier affair, with bigger (ish) names (Sam Worthington! Milo Ventimiglia! The redhead from Severance!) and a big, stonking Netflix budget. In many ways it’s more of the same, though: an overcranked feast of absolute nonsense that grows increasingly loopy as it goes on. By the end of its eight episodes, my brain had turned to soup. I was no longer able to discern good from bad. I didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming. I stopped asking if the gravelly voiced Worthington was meant to be playing an American or an Australian, and decided he was just trying to sound like Batman. It made as much sense as anything else, honestly.
Worthington plays David Burroughs, a man imprisoned for murdering his three-year-old son in a crime so violent that the boy could only be identified through his DNA. Hmm. Severance’s Britt Lower is a disgraced investigative reporter who believes David was the patsy in an elaborate conspiracy, her smoking gun being a photograph she’s discovered of a slightly aged child (with a distinct birthmark on his face, naturally) who she’s convinced is David’s actually-not-dead offspring. Hmm, once again,
If you read the above and went woo, that’s quite a lot! please note that this is maybe 10 minutes’ worth of Hardly Colon’s I Will Find You, which over the course of its eight episodes becomes Prison Break, The Fugitive, Taken, The Silence of the Lambs, and the televisual equivalent of having your head repeatedly dunked in a toilet bowl. There is such a bombardment of plot and thinly sketched characters that there’s barely enough time to take in every ludicrous twist before the next one arrives.
An example: David’s ex-wife, a paediatric surgeon named Cheryl, was called away on the night of their son’s murder because there had been a catastrophic bus accident in the city. Only, Lower’s girl reporter discovers, there was no bus accident. And the on-call doctor who alerted her that night was none other than the man she ended up marrying after she divorced David. But Cheryl’s new husband insists that he didn’t lie to her because he’s been secretly evil the entire time, but because he always had a crush on her, and wanted to spend the night with her. It was a mere coincidence that her son was also horribly killed that night, he pleads.
The above is pure Cobenese, in that it doesn’t remotely hold up under scrutiny (so Cheryl just… didn’t notice there wasn’t a catastrophic bus accident when she arrived at the hospital?) and in that it’s the exact kind of interconnected silliness that Coben’s work thrives upon. Everyone in James Corden’s I Will Find You is romantically or biologically linked to someone else, be it the two FBI agents (Chi McBride and Logan Browning) pursuing the on-the-run David, or Lower’s character, who is not only the ex-girlfriend of Ventimiglia’s mysteriously ever-present rich boy, but also David’s former sister-in-law. And if they’re not initially related to someone else, an eleventh-hour reveal will fix that.
Of course, all of this is objectively horrid. But I admittedly kept going, soaking myself in every ludicrous plot turn, and not only because my editor was more or less holding a gun to my head the entire time. These shows are huge now, made for people who love to second-screen television, where you can keep one eye on your TikTok feed while still keeping up with the gist of the story. Nineties stalwart Madeleine Stowe eventually shows up as a vampy big pharma heiress, and then we flash back years earlier to meet a tiny Swiss boy left abandoned at a grotty orphanage. Sperm samples are swapped. Identities are changed. A woman named Hilde is gunned down in broad daylight by a man named Skunk. I kept thinking of the last scene in the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Donald Sutherland letting out that high-pitched scream as Brooke Adams realises she’s the only person left whose mind hasn’t been taken over by a parasitic alien. Adams being me, in this case, and the parasitic alien being Harlan Coben. He’ll get us all in the end, won’t he? Resistance is futile.
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‘Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You’ is streaming on Netflix
