Summary
Missing You delivers precisely what you’d expect from a Harlan Coben and Netflix collaboration – a silly but highly bingeable crime thriller.
It’s becoming something of a tradition to bring in the new year with a deeply silly series from Harlan Coben, whose partnership with Netflix continues to bear fruit that may well choke you if you’re not careful. The latest is Missing You, a five-part thriller that is both as daft and easily bingeable as 2024’s Fool Me Once, though mercifully briefer.
I say “mercifully” not because Missing You is bad – on the contrary, it’s engaging and pacey throughout and ends up yielding decent answers to its many questions if you put the time in – but because it’d definitely fall apart if you had too long to think about it. This seems to be true of everything with Coben’s name on it, such as Stay Close and The Innocent, but you shouldn’t let it be too much of an obstacle to your holiday entertainment.
Like Fool Me Once, Missing You has a compelling lead in Detective Inspector Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar from Slow Horses), a copper still dealing with the one-two punch of her father’s murder and the sudden disappearance of her fiancé, Josh (Ashley Walters, Top Boy), immediately afterward. Eleven years on, Kat happens to see Josh on a music-based dating app called Melody Cupid, and if you’re wondering whether this might all tie into Kat’s currently ongoing missing persons case, well, wonder no longer.
I’m reluctant to give away much more plot-wise, since this is the kind of show that connects everything through a variety of – sometimes contrived, admittedly – characters and circumstances, and a lot of the fun is trying to put it all together. And because you know everything is connected, the ping-ponging between various personal and professional subplots feels purposeful, especially given the fact there are only five episodes for writer Victoria Asare-Archer to work with.
Maybe the five episodes thing is the key. It’s unusually short for a Netflix limited series, but I’d rather a show did what it needed to do and then ended rather than pad out six or more episodes with needless filler. There’s something about the to-the-point attitude of Missing You that meshes well with Kat as a character, a proactive problem-solver who keeps shunting the plot along by sheer force of will.
Lenny Henry and Ashley Walters in Missing You | Image via Netflix
But she’s aided by a pretty good supporting cast. Richard Armitage (the guy who had sex with a bed in Netflix’s ridiculous Obsession) plays her boss, Stagger, while Lenny Henry shows up in flashbacks as her murdered policeman father, Clint. Kat’s friends Aqua (Mary Malone) and Stacey (Jessica Plummer) add a warm touch to her personal life, and James Nesbitt shows up briefly but impactfully as an oddly camp crime boss who may or may not have been responsible for Clint’s death.
Parts of Missing You don’t work, admittedly. The title refers to the John Waites song, and all of the episodes are named after ’80s hits, but the show has nothing to do with music whatsoever beyond shared tastes being the hook of the Melody Cupid app. This is a nitpick, to be fair, but it’s worth pointing out, as is the fact that Kat’s friend Stacey is a private investigator who follows cheating spouses around but somehow has more connections and resources than the police.
It suffers on the villain side of things too, with a totally uncomplicated bad guy who is evil to an almost cartoonish extent, which is weird given that most of the show’s interpersonal relationships are quite complex. Everyone on Kat’s side of the aisle feels textured and, for lack of a better term, real; they’re flawed, struggling to deal with their own dilemmas and feel as if they earn their place in a story that bends over backward to ensure they all matter in some way.
Is that contrived? Sure. The likelihood of every person and plot point being connected in quite the way they turn out to be is a bit of a stretch, and heading into the finale I was admittedly very skeptical of how everything would slot together. But I must admit that holistically Missing You works quite well. The pieces fit on a logical level, but they also reinforce some solid themes about acceptance, grief, and support. At the very least, you understand why each character made the decisions they did, even if you don’t necessarily agree with all of them.
But most people won’t care about this anyway. The longstanding partnership between Netflix and Harlan Coben is familiar to audiences by now, and they’ll enter Missing You with a fair idea of what to expect out of the gate. And, simply put, they’ll get it. They might not get anything more than what they were expecting, but this kind of streaming television is exactly what New Year’s Day is for.
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