1 out of 5

Created by: Danny Brocklehurst (adapted by)

There’s a feedback loop going on here, where I recognize that the Harlan Coben Netflix brand is producing diminishingly trashy returns, but I keep coming back, hooked on the promise of implausible twists and logically inconsistent story-telling, in which good or reliable actors show off their soapiest soap opera chops; so you get my viewership numbers, binge-watching eight episodes with ire, and thus, despite my single star rating, my lack of control guarantees another Coben project later on.

The “why” of this is the hunt for the occasionally relatively good outing, where the pacing better (I assume?) represents the books, and the central mystery – very often dealing with the reappearance of those disappeared or thought dead; very often with some To The Top! conspiracy as justification – actually feels woven into the characters and drama. A good Coben adaptation is fun popcorn, and I guess I subsist on the memory of the few successes.

But still, I’m the problem.

And Fool Me Once has none of the potential positives of these things, with particularly horrid pacing in its first half, and some quite offensely ignorant actions / reactions from its lead (physical assault is justified when someone’s a jerk!), and just a completely flailing focus, making its To The Topness and inevitable it’s-all-connected plotting feel particularly lazy.

As usual, though, we get some committed actors – Michelle Keegan is solid, if stuck in the central, illogically and irrationally acting role; Dino Fetscher is great, despite the script not knowing how to sell the story’s procedural aspects – and a compellingly Cobeny conceit: Maya Stern’s (Keegan) husband and sister have both recently been killed in seemingly unrelated robberies; when hubbie shows up on a recent recording – which Stern loses, of course – does this mean he’s not actually dead? …And this question spirals off into subsequent threads, with Maya getting increasingly desperate in her attempts to answer it. But there’s a tipping point in terms of assuming the audience will stick with you through some story gaps, and just rather rushed productions, and the show falls over into the latter literally from the first episode’s opening, which is a cold, contextless scene that sets a trend of the show just jamming in sequences for the purposes of backfilling information we’ll eventually reference. Set it to some templated “thrilling” music, and it’s supposed to indicate intrigue; paired with how the show effects some red herrings – showing a suspect that no right-minded person could possibly suspect, again with the thrilling music – it’s indicative of paint-by-numbers filmmaking. The additional nail in this is the show’s budget limitation, reusing the same flashbacks and some set sequences over, and over, and over again, chopped up a little differently.

None of this sinks things on its own, and / or isn’t can’t be an acceptable bump in an otherwise solid or sincere attempt, but Fool Me Once almost seems to be baiting me with its own title. It’s just all of the more egregiously empty-headed tendencies of these Coben productions packaged together, with none of the pluses doing much during the majority of the series to counter that.