Arts & EntertainmentScreen
Chloe Sargeant
July 23, 2026
Image: I Will Find You. Photo: Netflix.
At some point while watching one of those Harlan Coben Netflix series’, I’ll realise I’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake. And not because I’m hating it, but because I told myself I’d watch one episode before bed and now it’s somehow 2:30 in the morning, I’ve absent-mindedly demolished an entire family block of chocolate, and I’m sitting there trying to convince myself that watching the finale and getting a less than 3 hours sleep before my alarm goes off for work will be just fiiiiine.
The arrival of I Will Find You, the latest adaptation of one of Coben’s endlessly twisty novels, has somehow managed to continue a streak that I would have thought statistically impossible.
This is now the latest in a long line of Netflix’s Harlan Coben adaptations, and despite almost all of them sharing the same basic ingredients — missing people, impossbly convuluted secrets, suspiciously tense family dinners, old traumas attempting to stay buried and entire neighbourhoods of people apparently incapable of communicating like normal human beings — millions of us keep coming back for more.
On paper, these shows should have worn out their welcome years ago. They all follow roughly the same blueprint, and yet somehow you never seem to mind. Instead you find yourself asking the same increasingly ridiculous questions every single time. Who did it? Why are they lying? Why is everyone lying? Why does the nice neighbour suddenly have access to classified information? Why is nobody in these shows capable of a normal conversation? If somebody simply answered a perfectly reasonable question without staring into the middle distance and saying, “I can’t explain right now,” there’d barely be enough material for two episodes.
Maybe my attraction to this is the fact that I almost certainly have undiagnosed ADHD – according to almost all of my friends and several of my exes, my habit of rewatching the same shows over and over (I’m currently rewatching Supernatural for the 27th time) is one of the strong signifiers of it. There’s a comforting element in knowing what’s about to happen, like part of my constantly exhausted brain is able to switch off because I’m not trying to focus on what’s happening. Instead, I can just be entertained.
But unless millions and millions of people have ADHD, there has to be another reason why these Coben series are so popular. In fact,I Will Find You has racked up a whopping 63.9 million views, and was the #1 show on Netflix for over four weeks.
I think part of the magic is that Coben has never really been writing detective stories in the traditional sense. There might be murders, disappearances, kidnappings and conspiracies, but they’re rarely about detectives solving crimes so much as ordinary people having the absolute worst month of their lives. His protagonists are parents, teachers, doctors, journalists and people who were simply trying to get through another fairly normal Tuesday before somebody disappeared or an old photograph surfaced or a stranger knocked on the front door with information that immediately unravelled their entire fuckin’ life.
That’s certainly true of I Will Find You, where Sam Worthington plays David Burroughs, a father serving a life sentence for bashing his young son to death with a baseball bat, until a photograph shows up suggesting the boy is still alive after all. It’s the kind of premise that sounds completely ludicrous if you stop to analyse it for too long, yet because the emotional question underneath it is so earthly human — what parent wouldn’t chase even the tiniest chance that their child was alive? — you’re willing to follow the story almost anywhere it wants to go.
And Coben absolutely takes advantage of that willingness in this series and every other one too.
His stories don’t ask you to believe every twist because they’re realistic, its because you’ve become emotionally invested long before they arrive, and by that point your brain has quietly stopped fact-checking because your heart wants answers more than it wants plausibility. It’s actually quite an impressive trick, one he’s been pulling off for decades, because somewhere around the halfway mark of almost every Harlan Coben series you’ll inevitably have a moment where you stop and think, ‘hang on… this is so unbelievable and insane’. Then somebody discovers something else bonkers, and you are clickng play on the next episode without a second thought.
The twists themselves are only half the equation anyway. Underneath all the fake identities, hidden bunkers, mysterious CCTV footage and increasingly elaborate webs of lies, Coben’s stories are almost always about things that are surprisingly ordinary: grief, guilt, marriage, parenthood, regret and the uncomfortable secrets we all keep from the people we love – his books and these series’ epitomise the saying, ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
Netflix deserves some credit, because intentionally or otherwise, it has landed on exactly the right format for these stories. Rather than stretching them into sprawling, five-season mystery dramas where every subplot is milked for another year, they’ve largely kept them as compact limited series. Every episode reveals something, introduces another suspect or completely reframes what you thought you’d spent the previous hour learning, which means there’s barely enough breathing room for you to think, “I’ll stop here,” before the next cliffhanger politely informs you that stopping now would take the willpower of a small army.
We should resent being manipulated this often, but we don’t.
While critics have been a little divided over whether the formula is finally beginning to buckle under the weight of its own increasingly outrageous twists, audiences don’t seem especially interested in having that conversation. They’re watching anyway, because by this point the formula itself has almost become part of the appeal.
We know exactly what we’re signing up for. We know somebody’s identity probably isn’t real. We know a seemingly insignificant conversation in episode one will suddenly become the key to everything seven hours later. We know at least one person who appears unquestionably trustworthy almost certainly isn’t. And yet there’s something deeply comforting about handing yourself over to a storyteller who is so unapologetically committed to entertaining you that subtlety gets left at the door.
There are undoubtedly more sophisticated crime dramas on television, with better acting, better directing, better everything. Unless its for the reasons I’ve just laid out, these aren’t shows that critics will spend years dissecting or the kinds that will be in text books studied by film students.
But sometimes that’s not what you want! Sometimes you want to spend eight hours watching attractive but horrifically stressed people sprint through forests and discover long-buried family secrets.
Harlan Coben understands that better than almost anyone writing for television right now, and Netflix has wisely decided there’s no point fixing a formula that makes us all stay up all night and have a TERRIBLE time at work the next day. (Not so terrible relative to a Harlan Coben character though, I suppose.) Subtlety be damned.
