Harlan Coben, Missing You Cast on Emotional Ending of New Netflix Show

Harlan Coben is the master of twisty-turny page-turners and, increasingly, TV shows. The prolific crime author has had a number of his thrillers adapted for screen and the latest, “Missing You,” is set to get Netflix viewers talking once again following the success of his last adaptation for the streamer, “Fool Me Once,” which was one of the streamer’s most popular shows of 2024.

For Coben, showrunner Victoria Asare-Archer and the cast, the challenge was to balance those nail-biting cliff-hangers with character development and relationships that viewers could relate to. “We wanted to keep the twists and turns and the suspense,” Coben said during a press launch for the series in November. “But I think, as [producer] Nicola Shindler mentioned, this is also a love story. Really, the story between Kat and Josh is at the center here.”

The Kat in question is Detective Inspector Kat Donovan, played by “Slow Horses” star Rosalind Eleazar. Still picking up the pieces after the death of her father (played by Lenny Henry) and breakdown of her engagement to Josh (Ashley Walters), she finds herself unravelling a mystery that could give her the answers she’s long been searching for. “It’s got all the trademark Harlan stuff that people love,” said Henry. “Those intriguing details, those relationships and those hooks.”

But what elevates it from a typical procedural, in Henry’s eyes, is the focus on the relationships between Kat and her friends, family and colleagues, including her boss Ellis Stagger (Richard Armitage, marking his fourth Coben adaptation).

“I think what’s happened these days is we’ve allowed family and relationships to permeate these things,” said Henry. “It’s the humanness of drama that make us want to watch. It’s not just the procedural element, it’s everything now.”

“We’ve had a bit of a revolution in television,” added the “Rings of Power” star. “And I say hooray for that.”

For Coben, who weaved in storylines about Kat’s aunts and her friendships amid the tension, this adaptation has been the most moving of all of his previous work. “This is the most emotional ending that I’ve experienced,” he admitted. “When I watched Episode 5, I actually cried. I think I had a little bit of a tear in my eye maybe with ‘Fool Me Once’ also. But I think this will be the most emotional series.”

That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of tension too, of course (Henry joked “It’s like crack for television”). Eleazar, who was asked to audition not long after she got married, said she spent her honeymoon reading the novel — something she quipped her new husband “wasn’t particularly happy about.”

“The book is incredible,” she said. “It’s a real page-turner and the final few moments are just the most shocking. I was not expecting at all for the story to go that way.”

Asare-Archer also said she was shocked by the ending when she first read the book. “I thought, ‘I’m gonna guess the ending. I’m gonna predict who’s the killer,’” she recalled of reading it. “And it was the only book I got to the end — gasp — I went straight back to the beginning. Even I couldn’t predict it. It’s definitely both emotional and there’s a huge twist.”

When it came to adapting it for TV, the writer said she was aware that many fans would be tempted to binge-watch the five episodes, which released simultaneously on Netflix on Wednesday, in one go. But she didn’t let it affect how she approached the adaptation.

“Our job is to write brilliant stories and make a brilliant series, it is up to audience decide how they want to watch it,” she said. “Having said that, if this is as gripping and character-full and emotional as we think it is, I think it should be a series that you don’t want to stop watching. You want to keep going…and it’s only five episodes, so that’s a perfect New Year’s Day binge!”