The review examines the latest Netflix adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel, noting the series' formulaic nature and its increasing resemblance to camp. It highlights recurring themes like vanishing loved ones, hidden truths within seemingly perfect families, and a constant sense of unease. The author concludes that while entertaining, experiencing these shows in moderation is recommended due to their potential to make the mundane feel menacing.
The English-language productions of these often hugely popular series tend to come out around New Year’s, a time ideal for pajamaed bingeing, and they deliver a reliable blend of good-looking actors in suburban-luxe settings dealing with a cascade of deliriously brisk, crowd-pleasing cliff-hangers and plot twists. The format has become so familiar, and yet so reliably entertaining, that it’s edging toward camp.
The most telling sign of this slippage are the cameos in by James Nesbitt and Marc Warren—lead stars of other British detective series doing gleeful turns as villains here, exhibiting their fondness for the outrageous excesses of Coben’s storytelling and the opportunities for scenery chewing it provides. , a police detective obsessed with extracting the last remaining bit of information about her father’s murder from the imprisoned hit man (Warren) who confessed to the crime. Now on his deathbed, the evil hit man taunts her to her tearful face with his refusal to say why his boss (Nesbitt, playing a crime lord as twinkly and puckish as Santa Claus) ordered the killing. When a deliciously sinister prison nurse offers to administer a painkiller that works as a truth serum, the man admits that he didn’t kill Kat’s father after all. Since he was already serving a life sentence, he merely accepted a bribe to take the fall. Meanwhile, Kat’s former fiancé Josh (Ashley Walters), who vanished 11 years ago, matches up with the dating-app profile that a well-meaning friend created for Kat. Vanishing loved ones are a mainstay of the Coben adaptation. Nine miniseries into the author’s multiyear deal with Netflix, the stories have featured disappearing lovers, spouses, and children. Kat came home one day to the flat she shared with Josh to find him gone, along with all his stuff. Much the same thing happens to Guillaume in 2021’s. He proposes to his beautiful girlfriend, only to discover that she and all her earthly possessions have been subtracted from the sleek high-rise apartment where they live—a place, with its stunning views of Nice, that’s hardly the digs you’d expect for a couple of French social workers.At times, this translation in setting can make a miniseries more preposterous than the novel it’s based on. A parallel plot in—both novel and series—has to do with Titus (Steve Pemberton), a monstrous baddie running a kidnapping and extortion racket out of a farm. He and a team of near-silent goons stash their marks on the property until they have extracted as much of their assets as possible, then finish them off and incinerate their remains. In the novel, the farm is a former Amish homestead in backwoods Pennsylvania, a place whose old root cellars serve as cells for the prisoners. Perhaps to avoid explaining all this, the Netflix adaptation has Titus keep his victims—nearly a dozen of them, by the looks of it—chained up in horse stables, where, inexplicably, they never try to make contact with each other, despite the mere 6 or 7 feet between them. It’s plausible that a criminal genius might be able to get away with such an elaborate scheme in some remote American woodland, but in the more densely populated rural England, with its famously nosy villagers, the notion is improbable, to say the least.Coben’s Netflix joints sometimes feature a parallel plot with a fiendish murderer like Titus or the serial killer with his lollipop-sucking doxy accomplice inbut the real focus is always a middle-class professional with a seemingly enviable life whose wholesome facade hides some dark secrets. The setup for the plot must always appear rosy. Even Kat—unmarried and childless—starts out markedly different from the brooding loner detective familiar to crime fiction fans. She has a great single life, with a doting mom and passel of aunties and devoted friends. Even the squad room infeels cozy, with an avuncular senior detective who kisses Kat on the head, and a boss (Richard Armitage, a regular in Coben’s Netflix shows) who treats her like a cherished younger sister. In fact, as the story rockets breathlessly toward its conclusion, it emerges that most of the mysteries in Kat’s personal life are the doing of people who love her too much to tell her the truth. She seems like a big girl, yet so many of her loved ones have made over-the-top sacrifices to shelter her.played by Agnieszka Grochowska, is told exactly the same thing by her husband. Both Tom and Laura have installed spyware on their teenage kids’ phones. Both kids are reacting dramatically to a loss. Tom’s daughter resents him for dating a neighbor so soon (a year) after his wife’s death, and Laura’s son blames himself for his best friend’s suicide. These are the sorts of ordinary, if difficult, problems that in the Cobenverse get suddenly juiced by a freaky occurrence, the hook that digs itself into the audience’s gaping mouth. , reviews the previous night’s baby cam footage and sees her supposedly dead husband (Richard Armitage again!) playing with their toddler. An enigmatic woman in a baseball cap ambushes the characters in, a contented suburban mom on the verge of marrying her longtime partner panics when she finds a congratulatory bottle of champagne on her doorstep addressed to the name she no longer uses. A naked unconscious boy turns up in the woods, and an alpaca is inexplicably decapitated (!) inAnd, of course, people are constantly and mysteriously disappearing, while nobody else is exactly who they appear to be. Soon, the main character is racing around to a soundtrack of urgently thumping snare drums, frantically searching for clues, while the camera occasionally cuts to a neighbor who—surprise!—has a corpse in his freezer.This is the refrain of Coben’s Netflix shows, and a preoccupation it shares with the still-booming literary genre known as the, the latter of which was also recently adapted into a hit Netflix series): Even the most secure and Instagram-worthy middle-class life rests on a foundation of lies. Spouses cheat or conceal shocking truths about their past, and teenagers are forever leaving the comfortable homes created for them to hang out near abandoned concrete structures covered with weeds and graffiti to party and do drugs. No place—neither the gated community of spacious faux-Tudor houses in—can escape unscathed. It’s a vision that taps into equal quantities of envy and anxiety. Sure, the families who present an annoyingly perfect face to the world are actually full of impostors and criminals, but also: You can’t trust anyone in your own life either. Laura, the jittery mother in, with her staring, sleepless eyes and perpetually taut neck tendons, is a poster child for this syndrome. Her vigilance in protecting her family may be called for, but the stress also seems likely to kill her.have become reliable, absurd fun, but I cannot recommend watching more than one at a time. With sustained exposure, the everyday world starts to feel as if it’s crawling with unseen threats. Even the hammy performances of the bad guys in, as ripe as Vincent Price in his reassuringly unscary old horror films, can’t dispel the uneasiness. Maybe it’s best that they come out only once a year
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