Netflix just released another Harlan Coben adaptation called Missing You, and while it sits at a surprising 5 episodes only, that's 5 episodes of my time I'll never get back. When it comes to these adaptations, people say if you've seen one, you've seen them all. But when The Stranger and especially Stay Close both exceeded my expectations following the mediocre Fool Me Once, I eagerly clicked on the newly released Missing You, and boy was that a mistake.
For the first four episodes, I was fairly interested in the mysteries. The sometimes overexpositony dialogue wasn't bad enough to stop watching, and I kept my focus on figuring out what this story would be about. I wondered how the various pieces of the puzzle that were set up would eventually come together, especially the mystery surrounding the death of the main character Kat's father and the secondary storyline about the weird dog breeder Titus who was holding all these people captive to drain their bank accounts. Surely, they couldn't be two disparate storylines connected only by Kat's involvement as the investigator.
Surely not.
Well, we get to episode 5 and I'm thinking huh, this feels a lot like a finale. I didn't expect Titus to get caught this early on. I wonder what's gonna happen next. Will we find out how this stuff is connected to Kat's father? The answer to that was a resounding yes. Yes, we do find out — that there is no connection.
What?? You mean this whole time we've been following two completely different storylines for literally no reason? What was the point? And no, Titus using Kat's ex's photo leading to her reconnecting with him and finding out he killed her father (by accident) is not a valid connection. I'm talking character journeys, thematic parallels, general plots. The Stranger may have had kind of a random reveal, but at least it managed to connect everything that was going on. Stay Close did such a good job connecting all the various storylines while also grounding the plot in the character journeys. And Fool Me Once, with its shorter episode count, didn't even bother with multiple storylines, and at least it wrapped up what it did have.
But this show...what was the point of any of it? Kat learns her father wasn't who she thought she was and that everyone around her was working to protect her from that truth. Okay, so what? What does that have to do with anything? How does that affect her life? The show ends right after Josh tells her what happens and she decides to hold his hand. Is that really it? You just learned some insane information and we're not even gonna see you process that?
I'm not surprised it was Josh who killed Clint and that it was an accident while trying to protect Aqua, and as soon as they showed that flashback of Stagger with blood on his hands it was obvious he probably got that from trying to help the wounded. But the show spent so much time trying to make us super suspicious of every single person for literally no reason and I just don't understand why. It's like amp up suspense and then reveal Aqua's saw Josh, which isn't that bad, then amp up some more suspense and then reveal Stacey talked to Josh, which isn't that bad, and on and on it goes. I mean why was Josh looking for Kat in the first place if not for the writers wanting to create some drama between Kat and her secret-keeping friends?
The worst part is we had a pretty interesting cast of characters that didn't even get time to marinate. Apart from Kat, we had Kat's mother and friends, Nia and Charlie, Stagger and the retired boss, Calligan, the kid and his mom, like why couldn't they have crafted a story around all these characters that was actually good and actually had a point? And what the hell was Titus doing? Did he only exist as a warning from the writers about how the people behind these dating profiles can be fake scammers? And why didn't Rishi Magari exit the same way the bad guy entered so he actually could've escaped? (Had to roll my eyes when they made him try to smash through the locked barn door instead of getting out through the closer open door.)
Maybe Netflix has gotten super lazy with these adaptations because they know people will immediately click on a Harlan Coben show. I actually didn't check out Fool Me Once when it came out, but I did once I found out Richard Armitage was in it because he's a really strong actor, and I was surprised to find out how successful that series was, ranking alongside Bridgerton and Wednesday in terms of most viewed single seasons of TV on Netflix. I guess mediocrity really does win hearts.
But this series was the latest of several adaptations which included 2020's The Stranger and 2021's Stay Close, and these two were longer and much better but didn't do nearly as well as Fool Me Once. So what's the secret? Fewer episodes? Or were those previous shows required to build the brand of Harlan Coben mysteries to the point where if you see a sinister looking house and Richard Armitage on the thumbnail, you know to click immediately?
No wonder everything about this show just felt so underdeveloped as if all the writers cared about was creating suspense, no matter how manufactured it felt. Seeing your ex on a dating app and finding out it's not really him could've been a decent premise for a series like this, but they just didn't deliver. Kat goes on this crazy journey to track him down and they get back together and that's about it. I feel like they set up the dating app mystery to be a lot more sinister, and it was, but not for Kat. There was no personal connection between the two storylines, the Titus stuff only existed to force Kat to find Josh after all these years.
And this, of course, was perfect timing because despite her father's killer being sentenced way back when, only now is the killer finally confessing that he didn't actually do it. Why does he confess? Guilty conscience on his deathbed? Nope. When Kat finds out he's about to die from cancer, she tries to get him to reveal the truth, and when he doesn't, the nurse shoots him up with morphine to get him to think he's talking to his sister about how he was paid to take the fall but conveniently falls asleep before exposing the rest (i.e. that it was Josh and that Stagger arranged the confession).
Then there's the matter of Calligan. The audacity to get James Nesbitt in here after his spectacular performance in Stay Close and do absolutely nothing with him. He's supposedly this crime boss that blackmailed Kat's father into helping him by threatening to reveal his secret boyfriend. Um...okay? If this series is supposed to be about Kat learning that the father she idolized wasn't the man she thought he was, then the story should've been crafted around that in every aspect. Not just the plot, but her own character journey and how this is all affecting her, the themes (which there seem to be none of), and any subplots.
This is just not a carefully crafted series. It's two disparate investigations and some random revelations to keep people watching. There's no point to any of it because instead of thoroughly developing the story and its characters, Netflix just focused on making sure people would hit that "keep watching" button before yanking the rug out from under us in the extremely rushed finale, by which point, you've already watched the whole thing anyway.