Forget “Nashville’s Big Bash,” “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest,” and Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper taking advantage of CNN’s refreshment budget. TV’s most popular New Year’s tradition is fast becoming a Netflix whodunit which continually drops the ball in plot, dialog, and anything approaching the human condition.
Indeed, following the success of “Stay Close” and “Fool Me Once,” the streaming giant is once again ringing in the New Year with the help of potboiler extraordinaire Harlan Coben. This time around, it’s his 2014 novel “Missing You” getting the small screen treatment across five episodes precision tooled to binge along with your party leftovers. And it may well be the most far-fetched yet, no tall order considering previous ventures have involved everything from decapitated alpacas and deepfaked dead partners to a murderous cabaret duo named Ken and Barbie.
Named after the eponymous ‘80s chart-topper which plays during one overused flashback (it’s fair to say John Waite shouldn’t expect a “Murder on the Dancefloor”-esque renaissance), “Missing You” stars Rosalind Eleazar (“Slow Horses”) as Kat Donovan, a detective inspector who, like all Coben protagonists, has an unnecessarily mysterious past.
For one thing, her beloved policeman father Clint (Lenny Henry fulfilling the comedian-playing-straight role formerly occupied by Jennifer Saunders, Eddie Izzard, and Joanna Lumley) died 11 years ago at the hands of a depraved hitman (or did he?). For another, the journalist former boyfriend who suddenly left without a trace soon after, has now popped up on Melody Cupid, a music-based dating app unlikely to give Tinder bosses many sleepless nights (users are asked to – get ready to groan – ‘harmonize or mute’).
Could the two somehow be interlinked? As shown by the cold open in which she dispatches with an aggrieved, knife-wielding chef with the efficiency of Lara Croft, Kat is a resourceful heroine. And after a tearful meeting with Monte Leburne (Marc Warren), the terminally ill man found guilty of her pop’s murder, thickens the plot even further, she makes it her mission to uncover the truth.
Of course, this being a Coben adaptation and all, she’s repeatedly thwarted by various impossibly frustrating twists, curveballs, and cliffhangers, not to mention how every single person within her inner circle has a near-pathological aversion to the truth.
In fact, poor Kat spends most of her time being gaslit, castigated, or deliberately thrown off the scent by those she trusts without any credible explanation. “You need to let this go,” remarks boss Stagger (Richard Armitage in his fourth Coben series) as she dares to suggest Leburne’s conviction might not be as iron-clad as first thought. “Don’t you dare judge him,” barks her mom Odette (Brigid Zengeni) once Kat also learns her dad wasn’t the upstanding member of society she’d always envisioned.
This reticence is at odds with the characters’ tendencies to speak elsewhere like a Wikipedia biography. “He hurt you badly, he left you when you were grieving,” P.I. best friend Stacey (Jessica Plummer) helpfully reminds Kat about ex Josh’s (Ashley Walters) departure, a typically glaring example of the miniseries’ ‘tell not show’ approach to exposition: although Victoria Asare-Archer is credited as sole screenwriter (usual suspect Danny Brocklehurst is instead on board as executive producer), the script has a strong air of Chat GPT.
Kat has more than daddy issues and boy problems to deal with, though. As loyal Coben viewers will be expecting, “Missing You” interweaves several other ludicrous plotlines into its tangled web; a Beatle-haired teenager suspects there may be a sinister force behind his mum’s abrupt trip to Costa Rica; a sketchy financial advisor unwittingly facilitates a cam girl scam from the comfort of his man cave; and most ridiculously of all, a disciplinarian dog breeder uses his farmyard as a smokescreen for an abduction/torture camp.
Yes, in further proof the show’s police force are as incompetent as they are evasive, the latter has been able to kidnap, defraud, and in most cases, brutally execute an almost impressive number of locals from under their nose. Never mind that his operation is hopelessly unsophisticated — victims are catfished via photos sourced not from the other side of the world but essentially down the road — or that he’s risking multiple life sentences for relatively paltry sums (roughly $20,000 per head). “Missing You” asks us to believe Titus (Steve Pemberton, hamming it up like a pantomime villain) is a criminal mastermind akin to Hans Gruber.
Still, Pemberton is one of the few actors who appears to be aware of the lunacy they’re starring in. Even seasoned pros like Armitage and fellow Coben regular James Nesbitt, briefly returning here as a malevolent blast from the past, struggle to inject any sense of personality into their humorless cardboard cutouts. It’s therefore difficult to care when all the tawdry secrets finally spill out in a finale which somehow manages to be both overstuffed and distinctly underwhelming at the same time.
Nevertheless, Netflix will undoubtedly be happy with what they paid for (Coben still has at least two years and four adaptations left from the lucrative deal first inked in 2018). From ballsy heroines taking matters into their own hands and the kind of aspirational kitchens you’d expect to see in Architectural Digest, “Missing You” adheres to all the Coben tropes that made “Fool Me Once” the surprise hit of the year.
As Kat says herself after being forced to listen to her umpteenth tall tale, “It doesn’t make sense… your story makes no sense.” But in Coben’s ever-expanding, all-conquering world, nonsense is a virtue.
“Missing You” is now streaming on Netflix.
