| Worth seeing: | for the beautiful landscapes |
| Featuring: | Rosalind Eleazar, Steve Pemberton, Ashley Walters, Charlie Hamblett, James Nesbitt, Jessica Plummer, Lenny Henry, Lisa Faulkner, Mary Malone, Oscar Kennedy, Richard Armitage, Rudi Dharmalingam |
| Key crew: | Isher Sahota, Nimer Rashed, Guy Hescott, Harlan Coben, Sumerah Srivastav, Victoria Asare-Archer |
| Channel: | Netflix |
| Length: | 45 minutes |
| Episodes: | 5 |
| Broadcast date: | 1st January 2025 |
| Country: | UK |
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Ten years on, Detective Inspector Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) still hasn’t got over the murder of her father Clint (Lenny Henry), himself a highly respected police officer.
She’s also not over the break-up of her relationship with Josh (Ashley Walters), who broke off their engagement with no explanation and disappeared, never to be heard from again.
When a friend persuades her to join a dating up to try to move on, Josh turns up as a match – against everyone’s advice, she contacts him but gets blocked.
Kat soon discovers that at around the time Josh left her, he was one of the last people to visit the notorious hitman who confessed to killing her father – and he’s just died, so he can’t explain why.
As she’s trying to make sense of what’s going on, a young man, Brendan (Oscar Kennedy) approaches her to say that his mother had been using the same dating app and has disappeared without trace after getting together with Josh.
Her unconventional methods to get to the truth and her inability to leave her personal issues at home lead to a suspension from work, which makes it harder for her to work out how all these mysteries might be connected.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
A year on from Netflix’s flawed dramatisation of mystery-writer Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once, they have brought another of his novels to the screen, as Rosalind Eleazar leads an ensemble cast, including Richard Armitage, Ashley Walters and Sir Lenny Henry.
As you might expect from Harlan Coben, nothing is quite what it seems – those you thought you could trust might have skeletons in their closets, while those who appear to be part of a big conspiracy often turn out to have good reasons for their unconventional behaviour. The question for the audience is can you work out who can and can’t be trusted before it’s revealed.
And the answer is that you probably can’t. The plot is so convoluted and twisted that at any point, you feel it could go in any direction and there aren’t really any clues as to where the journey might take you.
This isn’t, in itself, a problem – except there’s not really much point in trying to work out what’s going on and it often leaves you feeling somewhat manipulated if you try.
Narratively, there are two separate stories lumped rather clumsily together – as the truth about her father’s murder slowly emerges, Kat is busy trying to find a missing woman and wouldn’t you know – her ex-boyfriend conveniently turns out to fit into both timelines – leading to the most excruciating explanation of a show title I can remember. The result of all of this is that the only real villain of the piece seems to have such a minor role that if he wasn’t even in it, the story could still unfold in the same way.
Much of the story seems to revolve around the locations they managed to secure, ensuring that warehouse apartments, remote lakeside homes and stunning riverside roads keep everything looking impressive, as if to distract you from the fact that the plot itself isn’t making much sense.
Much like in Fool Me Once, this plot couldn’t unfurl without lashings of exposition, coincidence and flashbacks – the main narrative difference is that on this occasion, every other character is black, gay or trans.
But oddly, while this often feels like a box-ticking, expositional contortion, the characters and situations feel just a little more believable.