If there’s one thing Netflix really knows how to nail, it’s a quick, buzzy, suspenseful series. Something short and sweet — maybe out of another country — that everyone can binge in a day or two, tell their friends they’ve got to watch because it blew their minds, and then forget about two weeks later. Think Baby Reindeer, Squid Game, or even Money Heist, all of which blew up relatively out of the blue and have had ripples on the streamer ever since.
That’s what happened with Fool Me Once, too, which lit up the service when it dropped last New Year’s Day. It’s anyone’s guess why the Harlan Coben adaptation hit — critics and audiences alike generally found it pretty meh — but it did so well for the service that Netflix immediately greenlit two other Coben adaptations, including this year’s New Year’s drop, Missing You.
An adaptation of a novel originally set in New York, Missing You tells the story of Manchester-based Detective Inspector Kat Donovan, charmingly played by Slow Horses’ Rosalind Eleazar. Kat not only specializes in missing person cases but has been a part of one herself when her almost too handsome fiancé, Josh (Ashley Walters), up and left her a decade earlier, right after the murder of her police officer father. It was a pretty shitty move, and it apparently shut down Kat to all love thereafter, but as we learn fairly quickly in Missing You’s first episode, it might also have been a bit nefarious.
The pieces start to click into place when Kat matches with Josh on a dating app called Melody Cupid, which matches you with people based on the music you like. (Why Josh is back in town, on the app, after such a dick move is anyone’s guess.) Kat swipes right on him, they connect, and she reaches out, looking for some sort of closure. He blows her off, saying he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for them to talk.
Around that same time, Kat learns that evil Monte LeBurne, the contract killer who murdered her father, has some sort of fast-acting cancer that’s left him just days to live. She foolishly enlists her private detective bestie to get her into the prison where LeBurne is being held, all to get some sort of answer. Monte doesn’t want to see her, or anyone, but the creepy, red-lipsticked nurse attending him lets Kat in all the same because, apparently, when you’re dying in prison, ethics go out the window.
That’s only reinforced when, after Monte clams up and revels in making Kat cry, his creepy nurse injects him with some sort of morphine-based truth serum, saying it’ll have him singing like a bird within minutes. It does the trick and Monte, believing Kat to be his sister, tells her that he wasn’t paid to kill her dad but rather to take the fall. He was already locked up for two other killings, so what’s a third? Kat’s shocked, but anyone with half a brain could have told you that Monte wasn’t going to be good for this murder one way or another. It’s episode one, after all. There’s more story to tell.
Meanwhile, Kat’s private eye friend calls her (?) from out in the prison parking lot to tell her that she pulled the records of everyone who’s ever visited Monte. (Gasp!) Apparently, Josh had been there the day before he had up and ditched Kat and town, casting even more aspersions on his character.
All of this personal drama for Kat isn’t happening in a bubble, though. She also has day job drama, with a new young techy co-worker and a missing guy named Rishi, who we see fairly banged up and wandering aimlessly through fields when he’s not thinking about some dream girl set hazily against soft lighting.
I’m skeptical that this girl ever existed; As we see, Rishi gets captured and tied up by some dude in a tractor toward the end of episode one, and when Kat and her partners search the cottage Rishi had been renting, they find unopened champagne and wrapped up lingerie, as well as an assertion that while he booked the cottage for two people, he showed up alone. I’d wager the evil cattle prod guy catfished Rishi with the promise of this blurry babe, though I’m not sure to what end or where and/or if it ties into whatever’s going on with Kat, Josh, and her late dad. Luckily, since the next episode of Missing You is already there on Netflix, waiting for you to begrudgingly say, “Oh fine, just one more,” even though it’s way too late at night, none of us will have to wait very long to find out.
Missing Notes
• I’d bet big money that the decision to shoot Missing You in the U.K. rather than NYC was made for either budgetary or logistical reasons, but I love it. There’s something about watching relatively unknown (to us) dramatic actors traipse around cute row houses, alfresco dining spots, and big empty farms that I just can’t get enough of. It’s more prestigious somehow, and I can’t explain why, but it’s a fact.
• There was something about the lingering shots of Kat’s friends at the end of the episode (Mary Malone’s Aqua in particular) that made me think they know more than what they’re letting on. Also, Richard Armitage’s Stagger, who’s Kat’s boss, definitely knows something. You’ll never convince me otherwise.