Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column, published every Friday, spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: the new Harlan Coben adaptation Missing You.
I made a terrible mistake when it came to Netflix’s Missing You. See, I watched it rather late into New Year’s Day. By then, my hangover had cleared entirely. And clarity is not the intended state of mind when it comes to any of these Harlan Coben adaptations, specifically the ones dropped in that period of mental crevice that is the holidays.
If you have the gift of clarity, you can see all the puppet strings. If you have the gift of clarity, you discover that Missing You is constructed out of three or four distinguishing characteristics, all narrative quirks, padded out with whatever dialogue is necessary to click them together into something vaguely resembling a continuous line of action.
It’s crucial to the effectiveness of Missing You that you do not remember the majority of its plot after the final credits have rolled: that, while investigating multiple, seemingly unrelated missing persons cases, DI Kat Donovan (Rosalind Eleazar) discovers that the fiancé who unexpectedly walked out on her (Ashley Walters’s Josh) has seemingly resurfaced, and that the man jailed for the murder of her father (Lenny Henry) may not actually be the one responsible.
Turns out, every single person in Kat’s life has been lying to her about something, for reasons the show never psychologically probes – sure, we all tell each other lies to protect each other, but when you’re the only person kept out of the loop, you should surely question what that says about other people’s judgement of your mental stability. Yet, every series of this ilk is about secrets. The ones here aren’t particularly explosive, and they’re tossed out with an uncommented-on matter-of-factness that does very little to lend them intrigue.
This is fine, because Victoria Asare-Archer’s take on Coben’s novel – one of his many tight, little airport reads, the tenth in a 14-book deal he made with Netflix – really only wants us to remember a few key details. Missing You is the one with the dating app based on mutual musical taste that ends up having sinister consequences. It’s the one that opens with a guy getting thrown off a horse in the middle of the moors like a Brontë novel, an image that ends having zero tonal relation to the rest of the story.
It’s the one that features cameos from Matt Willis from Busted and GK Barry from TikTok. It’s the one that has Steve Pemberton play a psychotic dog breeder who, after taking a meeting with potential owners, reveals he’s been snooping on them to the point he’s discovered an extramarital affair, before declaring: “You don’t deserve this puppy!”
Other than that, Missing You is all the same narrative churn. Regular Richard Armitage, who had roles in Coben adaptations The Stranger (2020), Stay Close (2021), and Fool Me Once (2024), returns here as DCI Ellis Stagger. There are thwarted attempts at wit (a potential reunion with Josh is lambasted as “getting on the ex bus”, while Kat declares, “Refusing to tidy up in the 21st century is a bold act of feminism”). And there’s no real central thesis to any of the five episodes’ many separate strands of story. But, then again, that’s not important. Remember only the weird dog breeder.
