Summary
Fool Me Once ticks all the boxes of a typical twisty-turny Coben thriller, but it’s elevated by Michelle Keegan and Joanna Lumley’s performances.
The holidays are about indulgence, and there’s no reason that shouldn’t extend to the telly. Netflix, in their infinite wisdom, know good and well to release a show like Fool Me Once, another thoroughly bonkers whodunit in the platform’s increasingly large stable of Harlan Coben adaptations, on New Year’s Day, when there’s enough leftover booze and cheese to help it pass by without too much interrogation.
All of these shows are intended to be consumed in one extended, faintly delirious sitting. They’re all smart enough to obscure how dumb they are until they’re finished. Fool Me Once ticks all the usual boxes, but it’s also slightly elevated by a compelling lead in Michelle Keegan and a fun foil in a game Joanna Lumley, evidently unsatisfied by Christmas dinner and here to chew all the scenery she can find.
The plot revolves around Maya (Keegan), a rapidly unravelling ex-army hotshot who has buried her sister Claire (Natalie Anderson) and her husband Joe (Richard Armitage) within a few months of each other. The trauma, not to mention an ongoing military matter that looms large over her once-distinguished career, has loosened Maya’s grip on reality, and in true Coben fashion, things are only going to get weirder.
Mere days after burying her husband, Maya spots him on a nanny cam, seemingly alive and well. Is she seeing things? A torrent of red herrings, twists, turns, and reveals suggest not, but convincing people of that is another matter. Not that Lumley, playing Maya’s mother-in-law Judith, would be inclined to believe her anyway, since she has made no secret of believing her son was always too good for the battle-hardened northerner.
On the subject of the “northerner” thing, Fool Me Once relocates Coben’s original story from New York to Manchester, England, and was filmed there for a touch of working-class post-industrial authenticity. But it retains the source material’s slaloming plot and the central hook of a woman descending into paranoia and aggression, unsure of what to believe, who to trust, or which parts of her life have been a lie.
Naturally, everything is connected, or at least seems to be. The recent deaths intertwine with each other and past secrets, discovered either intentionally by Maya or a rather hapless detective (Adeel Akhtar) with worsening health, or accidentally by peripheral characters like Claire’s teenage kids Abby and Daniel who’re not quite realizing the rabbit hole they’re about to tumble down. The audience remains along for the ride all the while, and the impulse to click on the next episode, and the next, and the next, is oftentimes overwhelming.
A perfect holiday binge
This is, of course, exactly what you want from a show such as this. The plot wriggles through eight long-ish episodes like it has other places to be, only becoming more ridiculous – in a good way – as it goes. Keegan makes a fine lead, offering real depth rather than just facile, supermodel good looks, and Lumley is similarly great. Even Richard Armitage, who has been historically humiliated by Netflix in dreck like Obsession, gets away relatively clean.
You could, naturally, pick holes in everything and ruin the enjoyment for everyone, but why bother? If there’s a place and time for silly television that is tightly engineered to be sped through quickly and thought about very little, then it’s streaming directly into your living room on New Year’s Day. But there’s some staying power in Fool Me Once as another silly but consistently engaging and indulgent thriller in Harlan Coben’s Netflix catalog.
