From Fool Me Once to Safe: How the Harlan Coben universe took over Netflix

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About quarter-hour into the first episode of Fool Me Once, Michelle Keegan’s Maya will get pepper sprayed in the face by her daughter’s childminder, after the pair have come to blows over a hidden digital camera disguised as a digital photograph body. I virtually whooped with glee. Not as a result of Keegan’s character, a newly widowed military veteran, appeared significantly deserving of comeuppance (she’d simply buried her murdered husband, for goodness sake), however as a result of the informal inclusion of a scene so objectively bonkers so early on on this eight-part Netflix sequence felt like omen. From right here, issues absolutely would solely get sillier and extra credulity-stretching. In brief, I used to be going to get exactly what I needed from the streamer’s newest Harlan Coben adaptation.

If you’re one way or the other unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Coben, whose identify hovers over the title playing cards of his TV exhibits to remind us who’s the boss, then your Netflix algorithm is actually extra discerning than mine. All you want to know is that this: Coben is the vastly profitable American creator of 35 thriller novels, and is a fixture on bestseller lists round the world. As a pupil at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he was a member of the similar fraternity as Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code and overlord of the airport thriller.

Coben’s books have a tendency to happen in monied communities in New York and neighbouring New Jersey, his house state, somewhat than in dusty museum archives and crypts, however he shares a style for cliffhangers and daring twists together with his previous classmate (“If you don’t like twists and turns, I’m not your guy,” he instructed The Scotsman final 12 months). In 2018, he signed a five-year mega-deal with Netflix, permitting the streamer to adapt 14 of his novels into English and foreign-language TV sequence. Fool Me Once is the fourth English manufacturing, following Safe (2018), The Stranger (2020) and Stay Close (2022), however there are additionally exhibits in French, Spanish and Polish.

These dramas are inevitably chock filled with gasp-inducing, head-scratching moments (like poor Michelle being briefly blinded with an aerosol). And as a substitute of being set towards their authentic backdrop (the New York tri-state space) the English-speaking variations of Coben’s work all happen in the northwest of England. Their actual location isn’t spelled out in the scripts (“We think it works better to make it more generic,” government producer Nicola Shindler has mentioned) however the gratuitous photographs of the Runcorn-Widnes Bridge are a large giveaway. Transplanting primarily American characters into a really British setting offers proceedings an uncanny, barely synthetic really feel. Keegan’s character spends most of her time coaching amateurs to drive helicopters and at the capturing vary, which doesn’t ring totally true. Sometimes the character names are jarring, albeit in an gratifying manner. In The Five, an authentic drama that Coben created for Sky again in 2016, pre-Netflix deal, the actor Lee Ingleby performs a person named Slade; maybe his fictional mother and father have been simply devoted followers of Noddy Holder and co.

The crucial verdict on these variations is as up, down and admittedly all over the place as a few of Coben’s wilder narrative impulses. They’ve been praised as the final responsible pleasure (in a four-star assessment of Fool Me Once, The Telegraph claimed its plot “moves like a slinky on steroids”, ie erratically and at pace) and derided as “junk food television” (The i), the TV model of empty energy: tales which are scrumptious in the second, however in the end depart you feeling unhappy and a bit grotty. The Independent’s chief TV critic Nick Hilton gave it only one star, predicting that tolerance for its excessive melodrama “will hinge entirely on your ability to switch off your brain and allow proceedings to wash over you”.

But whereas they may have divided reviewers, they appear to get a fairly resounding thumbs up from Netflix customers. The variations often crack the streaming platform’s Top 10 on their debut, and Fool Me Once is presently sitting at primary in the UK chart. Are they good, unhealthy, or so unhealthy they’re good? And why are viewers like me so hooked? The common Coben sequence is an inviting mixture of the unpredictable and the enjoyably formulaic, a bit like an Agatha Christie. We know just about what we’ve signed up for; we’re simply not totally positive of the particulars of how issues will play out. So twisty is his work that after the remaining finish credit have rolled, it’s categorically inconceivable to recall the specifics of every sequence’ storylines. Instead, they grow to be tousled into one huge, chaotic spiderweb (keep in mind these biology GCSE textbook photos imagining what webs spun by drugged-up spiders would possibly appear like?)

The typical plot goes one thing like this. A girl is, or as soon as was, romantically concerned with Richard Armitage, the actor who’s the undisputed king of the Harlan Coben TV Universe, with three such sequence on his CV (“Three’s enough, if not too many!” he instructed Radio Times final 12 months, to which I say: respectfully, Richard, three is not sufficient). She is hiding a darkish secret, one which connects her to a spate of mysterious disappearances, or a homicide investigation that has lengthy gone chilly. The Armitage character walks straight into this conspiracy and units about making an attempt to clear up issues for himself, often whereas pursued by baddies. He is alternately helped and held again by an odd-couple pair of cops.

For a contact of British Big Little Lies, everybody lives in large indifferent properties, and has beautiful hair that belies their emotional turmoil. There are numerous convoluted backstories involving childhood video games gone fallacious, mask-wearing cults or alpacas. Something tends to be awry at the native children’ soccer membership, the place the mother and father collect to communicate in exposition from the sidelines. And if there’s a beloved British comedy star on the forged checklist – Jennifer Saunders in The Stranger, Eddie Izzard in Stay Close – the odds of them making it to the remaining episode are excessive.

In Fool Me Once, there’s a slight shake up: this time, the Armitage character is a useless husband who seems in flashback (or, no less than, he’s supposed to be useless – however he nonetheless crops up in footage recorded on the sneaky photograph body digital camera after his funeral). And it’s his widow Maya, performed by Keegan, who should do the novice sleuthing. She’s additionally burdened by secrets and techniques of her personal. They relate to her time in the military, we study, and place her at the mercy of a whistleblower known as “Corey the Whistle”, who writes a weblog from a shack in the forest. And some variations don’t function Armitage in any respect.

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In 2018’s Safe, it’s Dexter star Michael C Hall who performs the moody bloke with the useless spouse, doing his finest British accent. The Five has a quartet of protagonists, who’re shaken to study that the DNA of their long-missing good friend has turned up at against the law scene. What all of them share, although, is a quick tempo and the type of stress-inducing episode endings that have you ever urgent “next” towards your higher judgement. That’s testomony not simply to Coben’s mad plots but in addition to screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst’s command of the supply materials; Brocklehurst has labored on all 5 English-language Coben variations, so has had loads of observe when it comes to shaping these tales into moreish nuggets.

Trope-y tales like these imply that the huge line-up of characters are sometimes fairly broadly drawn. But they’re persistently elevated by a few of Britain’s most recognisable tv performers. As nicely as Keegan and Armitage, Fool Me Once additionally options Joanna Lumley as Maya’s rich mother-in-law, an acid-tongued matriarch who wafts round the household property swathed in cashmere scarves, and Sherwood’s Adeel Akhtar as a police officer who retains mysteriously passing out at the wheel of his automobile. Stay Close starred Cush Jumbo, who’s extra typically discovered performing Shakespeare in the West End.

These exhibits are, let’s face it, in all probability not the most difficult dramatic materials that they’ve tackled, nevertheless it’s enjoyable to see which stars shall be known as up for the subsequent manufacturing, like a thespy type of jury service. In truth, with their spectacular forged lists, mega mansions and ridiculous narrative curveballs, they’re primarily a fun-house mirror model of your common ITV psychological thriller, buoyed by a Netflix funds to amp up the escapism. No marvel British audiences can’t get sufficient of this all-American creator. Long could the Harlan-verse proceed – and right here’s hoping Richard Armitage is on the telephone to his agent proper now.