According to legend, Alexander the Great, on his conquest across Asia, encountered an oxcart in the Phrygian city of Gordium. The oxcart was tethered by a knot of such staggering intricacy that the locals had vowed to swear fealty to anyone who could unravel it. Twist after twist had forged the knot, and only the greatest of minds could unpick it. The Gordian knot, though, was nothing compared to the mass of tangles created some 2,356 years later, by American author Harlan Coben, whose latest messy thriller, Missing You, arrives this week on Netflix.
Rosalind Eleazar – a fine supporting actor on shows like Harlots and Slow Horses – is Kat Thompson, a detective inspector somewhere in anonymous, semi-urban Britain. Many years ago, her father Clint (Lenny Henry), himself a celebrated copper, was murdered, and Kat has lived in the shadow of that trauma. Then, all at once, things start to happen: she receives word that her father’s convicted killer Monte (Marc Warren) has days to live, while her ex-fiancé Josh (Ashley Walters), who ghosted her a decade ago, shows up on a dating app. Suddenly, Kat finds herself scratching away at the lies she’s been told. “Pushing at this door is not going to bring your father back,” her boss, Sergeant Stagger (Richard Armitage), tells her. But it might bring her a step closer to understanding how he died.
Coben adaptations on Netflix are big business, apparently. At the start of the year, Fool Me Once proved a ratings hit despite a plot so daft that even ChatGPT would disavow it. That project attracted talent like Michelle Keegan, Joanna Lumley and Adeel Akhtar – and the cast is even more stacked here. In addition to the leads, there’s the stunt-casting of Busted bassist Matt Willis and TikToker GK Barry, as well as Steve Pemberton, deliciously deployed to chew the scenery as a murderous dog breeder, and James Nesbitt, making a return to the Coben Televisual Universe as grinning mob boss Calligan. “A lion takes down a gazelle,” Calligan warns Kat. “That’s the world God made, like it or not.” The real question, then, is who’s a lion, and who’s a gazelle?
Writing duties on this series have been offloaded from Danny Brocklehurst (who still serves as an executive producer) to Victoria Asare-Archer, yet it doesn’t mark much of a creative shift. Characters still talk like they are encountering human life for the first time (“Refusing to tidy up in the 21st century is a bold act of feminism,” Kat chuckles, like, you know, a human), and relationships seem mainly based on the exchange of potentially devastating information. Eleazar does her best to elevate Kat above a constant scowl, but the material keeps throwing her more reasons to frown. More confusion, more betrayal, more danger.
Of course, nobody, at this point, watches a Harlan Coben adaptation for the gripping interpersonal chemistry. This is television for the shattered attention span. Every few minutes there’s a new twist to trigger the dopamine receptors in your brain and try to keep you from doom scrolling on Instagram for another few minutes, until the next twist. There’s a sort of intellectual dishonesty to basing so much of your narrative on faulty information, but viewers won’t care so long as the cliffhangers and gasp-inducing revelations keep coming. It’s not subtle, but it is effective. And, after all, how did Alexander solve the riddle of the Gordian knot? He sliced through it with a sword.
All the same, while there is something efficient about the delivery of thrills in Missing You, it is too stupid and too manipulative to be encouraged. The audience response to Netflix’s spate of Coben adaptations – not to mention their modest budgets – means they’ll keep coming, and little effort will be made to add new dimensions to the characters or sense to the proceedings. Within these constraints, Missing You is not as bad as it could have been – but not half as good as it really ought to be.
