Most of the Netflix adaptations of Harlan Coben’s novels are characterized by solid writing, solid acting, and enough twists and turns to keep viewers interested. The streamer kicks off 2024 with a new Coben entry that has all of those elements, but executes them at a slightly higher level than some of the other adaptations of the author’s many, many novels.
Opening Shot: “1996.” A bunch of teenage boys run out of what looks like a boarding school building. Then you see a closeup of a group of masked teens chanting in front of one teen in a chair.
The Gist: “Present Day.” On a big countryside estate, a funeral for Joe Burkett (Richard Armitage) is being held. During the funeral, his widow, Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan), thinks back to when they met, when they got married, and the family they started to build together. She also thinks back to when she saw him murdered, as two teens on scramble bikes shot him at close range.
Maya sees DS Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) at the house afterwards, and is surprised the detective in charge of the murder investigation is there; he says he’s there at the invitation of Joe’s mother, Judith (Joanna Lumley). When Maya asks Judith about it, she says she wanted Kierce to see Joe as a person, not a case. Judith also thinks that Maya needs some help to process all the trauma she’s experienced in the last year, which also includes the shooting death of her sister.
When Maya returns home with her young daughter Lily (Thea Taylor-Morgan), her friend Eva (Adelle Leonce) gives her a present: A digital picture frame with a tiny nanny cam hidden inside of it. Maya insists she doesn’t need it; the family of her nanny Izabella (Natalia Kostrzewa) has worked for the Burketts for years. But Maya puts the camera in Lily’s room, just in case.
Maya is former military, and in addition to the trauma from her husband’s and sister’s murders, she holds trauma from an attack on civilians that led to her leaving her combat unit. At the training facility where she works, she runs into her friend Shane (Emmett J. Scanlan), who wonders why she’s back at work so soon, and insists that he and a few work friends come over to keep her company. “It’s my grief. I need the normality,” she tells him.
The next morning, when Maya looks at the video from the nanny cam, she’s shocked to see a man walk into the picture and hug Lily. When he turns his head, she’s even more shocked to see that it’s Joe. When Izabella shows up for work and Maya confronts her about it, Izabella responds by spraying Maya with pepper spray and running off. Not long after that, DS Kierce shows up, coincidentally to ask follow-up questions, and when Maya goes to play the video for him, the memory card it was on is gone, leading Kierce to wonder if grief is getting the better of her.
Kierce is dealing with his own issues: He’s planning a wedding with his pregnant fiancee Nicole, and he seems to be blacking out at weird times. When he crashes his car after one of those incidents, his boss, after getting assurances from Kierce that he hasn’t started drinking again, pairs him up with a young partner, DC Marty McGregor (Dino Fetscher), whom Kierce bemoans to Nicole that he’s so young “that Duran Duran came on the radio; he’d never even heard of them.”
At a soccer game her niece, Abby Walker (Danya Griver), is playing in, she has a confrontation with Abby’s aggressive coach; after the game, Abby’s dad Eddie (Marcus Garvey) tells her to stay away from his kids, telling Maya that “death follows you.”
Meanwhile, Maya is seeing Joe’s face everywhere, but insists that what she saw in the video was real. However, Izabella won’t see her and no one else believes her. Judith starts making noise that Maya may not be fit to take care of Lily for the time being. But Maya knows what she saw, and she wants an explanation.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Fool Me Once is one of the many Harlan Coben adaptations that Netflix has produced with the author over the past few years, and it has a similar tone to shows like Stay Close and Safe.
Our Take: Adapted by Daniel Brocklehurst from Coben’s 2016 novel, Fool Me Once has all the usual aspects of a Coben adaptation: A twisty plot, solid acting, and a bit of a wry sense of humor that pops up a few times per episode. And while there are points during the first episode where things seem to be a bit too complicated for our tastes, it still sets up an intriguing scenario that we’re eager to see play out over the limited series’ eight episodes.
If it seems that most of Coben’s protagonists are people who are buckling under stress or grief, often perceiving or seeing something that others don’t, you’re not wrong. It’s why the quality of a particular adaptation sometimes comes down to the credibility of the performance of the actor playing that protagonist. Here, Keegan holds things down well as Maya; she projects the toughness that we’d expect to see from a former special ops pilot, and the confidence that what she saw on that video was real. She plays especially well in her scenes with Lumley, who is an expert at playing officious rich people who think they know better than the people they deal with. By the end of the first episode, we know that Lumley’s character Judith is hiding something related to the scene from 1996, which we’re sure will come out as the greater conspiracy is revealed.
About that conspiracy: It’s not a big surprise that Joe’s murder and the murder of Maya’s sister Claire (Natalie Anderson) end up being related. Eventually, as Maya gets caught up in what’s going on with Joe, her niece Abby and nephew Daniel (Daniel Burt) will get involved in figuring out what happened with their mother. Taking the plot in that direction can either be interesting and somewhat novel, or it can end up being “kid detectives are on the case!”; either way, we’re intrigued by seeing the younger characters get involved.
As with most conspiracy-related mystery plots, there is potential that the writing can completely unravel, but we’re invested enough in these characters at this point that we can let some ridiculousness go, as long as we get to a satisfying conclusion.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: We see more flashbacks to 1996, and then Judith is at the grave of her son Andrew, who we’re assuming died during that hazing incident 27 years ago.
Sleeper Star: This is a good place to discuss Adeel Akhtar as DS Sami Kierce. We really like Kierce; he’s serious about his job and is concerned about what’s happening to him, but he still seems to maintain a dry sense of humor about everything. His presence helps keep the show’s intensity level from getting too out of control. In fact, we would love to see a whole series centering around Kierce. We’re just not sure where his plot connects with the greater conspiracy surrounding Joe’s death, and if his story is just going to be a distraction as the mystery starts to reveal itself.
Most Pilot-y Line: There are a couple of lines that feel like a character performing exposition: Kierce tells Maya that ballistics has connected the murders of her husband with “your sister, Claire Walker,” and at the funeral reception, when Judith wonders how Maya is coping, Maya replies with “I’m grieving. I lost the love of my life.” Neither of those lines would be necessary in real-life conversation.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Fool Me Once has enough potential for some intriguing plot twists, and more than enough solid performances, to make up for some awkward dialogue and plot points that feel like they’re going to unnecessarily complicate things.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.