Usually, Netflix‘s Harlan Coben adaptations are fun diversions that take lots of crazy turns that the viewers don’t try to think to hard about as they watch. The latest, I Will Find You sets that tone early, but the plot turns in the first episode are even crazier than usual, and not in a good way.
Opening Shot: We see scenes of a child running in his yard, his parents looking on. The child has a birthmark on his right cheek.
The Gist: Five years after that scene, David Burroughs (Sam Worthington) is in a prison in Maine, having been convicted of killing his son Matthew (Jasper Rainn Lawrence). He was wrongly convicted, as he was asleep in another room when Matthew was beaten to death, though he found his son’s body. In addition, Matthew could not be visually IDed, so he was identified via DNA.
He hasn’t taken visitors, including his ex-wife Cheryl Dreason (Erin Richards). But his sister-in-law, Rachel Mills (Britt Lower) pays a surprise visit, with shocking information: A photo where there’s a kid in the background with a birthmark on his right cheek. Could that be Matthew?
It seems impossible, but it seems that one of the corrections officers, Ted Wesson (Christopher Redman), gets nervous enough about the conversation to cut it off. While Rachel, a journalist who has been biding her time teaching at a college since leaving the Boston Globe under a cloud, looks into the things, David goes to the warden, Philip Mackenzie (Peter Outerbridge), who was partners with David’s father Lenny (Hugh Thompson) on the Boston PD, for the case files.
In the meantime, Wesson is trying his hardest to make sure David doesn’t stay alive long enough to find out about what really happened to Matthew, including looking the other way when a notorious serial killer is secretly taken out of Ag Sec and added to David’s work detail, specifically to beat him to death. But David gets the upper hand, and takes his anger out on the dangerous killer.
Wesson then makes another attempt at killing David, telling him that he took money to take him out. Realizing he can no longer protect David, a suspicious Mackenzie, along with his son and David’s friend Adam (Jonathan Tucker) take matters into their own hands, helping David escape so he can find his son.
In the meantime, Rachel follows the lead David provided, a neighbor who testified at David’s trial whom he knows lied about seeing him with the child’s body. She finds out from her old Globe editor that the woman changed her name and moved shortly after the trial.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? I Will Find You, created by Robert Hull and based on Harlan Coben’s 2023 novel (as with all Coben adaptations on Netflix, the author is an executive producer), has a similar tone to other Coben adaptations, like Missing You, Run Away and Fool Me Once.
Our Take: First, let’s talk about the entire reason why the show exists: the fact that Matthew might still be alive. This is despite the fact that he was identified via his DNA. How is that even possible? Did someone with a lot of power pay the medical examiner to lie? Did Matthew’s DNA somehow get swapped out? Does Matthew have an identical twin that it seems that David doesn’t know about?
That third scenario, as soap-operaish as it seems, feels like the most likely scenario to us, which means that Cheryl had twins and one was taken from her for some reason. We hope that the explanation is less eye-roll-inducing, but the fact that both David and Rachel are credulously looking into things without dwelling much on how this can possibly happen makes us scratch our heads. And we’re not even approaching how Mackenzie helps David escape, which is one of the more ridiculous scenes we’ve seen in an action thriller in some time.
Speaking of Rachel, it feels that Lower is in a different show than Worthington and the rest of the cast. It’s hard to imagine Lower going from her Emmy-winning role in Severance to a standard-grade Coben thriller, but she manages to infuse Rachel with layers and subtlety that the character really doesn’t have on the page. In the meantime, Worthington barely squelches his Aussie accent under some kind of Boston-adjacent lilt, and he mainly gets to act angry.
What we did appreciate is that Hull keeps things straightforward in the first episode, not introducing more characters and storylines. We know that they will be introduced eventually, but at least we don’t have that dizzying feeling we get at the end of the first episode of a Coben adaptation, wondering how so many characters and storylines fit into the narrative.
Performance Worth Watching: As we said, Lower feels like she’s acting in a different show than the rest of the cast, as she makes Rachel a character we’d like to see as the centerpiece of other Coben adaptations.
Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: David and Mackenzie are stuck at a roadblock. David holds a gun to Mackenzie’s head so it makes it look like he’s threatening the warden’s life as they try to run the blockade.
Sleeper Star: We’ll say Milo Ventimiglia as Hayden, Rachel’s ex who is still a confidante, and Chi McBride as Max Williams, an FBI agent who specializes in tracking down fugitives like David.
Most Pilot-y Line: There are lots of leaden lines in the first episode script, including Mackenzie visiting Lenny, who is retired and suffering from a cancer diagnosis, and saying, “I wish I could sit around and watch the game in the middle of the day.” The guy has cancer! Give him a break!
Our Call: SKIP IT. Despite a riveting performance from Britt Lower, I Will Find You is one of the more ridiculous Coben adaptations we’ve seen, and that’s saying a lot.
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.
