1 out of 5

Created by: Robert Hull

When I talk about Harlan Coben adaptations, I generally describe them as trashy TV. But when I sift back through my reviews, I realize I’m really getting stuck on a couple of key examples; while the adaptations do tend to collectively point to some eye-rolling tropes which I’ll suppose are in the source materials, individually, they’ve averaged from enjoyable distractions to pretty quality television. Like, I’m still under the impression from the half of a Coben book I read some decades ago that it’s airport fiction; I can’t / shouldn’t criticize the genre, given some of my own preferences, but whether or not that’s an accurate impression, it seems like there are good stories and characters to be plucked from Coben’s ouevre, and some TV adapters have tapped into that.

…Whereas I Will Find You, written or co-written by showrunner Robert Hull is now one of those key examples of trashy Corben TV, though not exactly because of its painfully dumb twists, underwritten characters, or focus on sex or violence for views; rather, it’s like the most dedicated collection of the most blase version of all of Corben’s tropes – what we might criticize as an AI-written script in the late 2020s. And I dislike being that critical, sincerely; but at several points during these eight episodes, I kept marveling at how underbaked every aspect of it was – how any line of dialogue is exact exposition (as in: if I mention a detail, it is not “flavor,” it is because it is a plot point), and none of the drama or action or procedural stuff is written to have any sense of reality, and is more about getting us from point A to B to C under budget and in the right slice for 1/8th of the total story. Roping in old-hands at TV directing just adds to the generics; meanwhile, what’s notable is netting an A-level cast to read the hell out of all this blase stuff. That doesn’t make it good, but, like, everyone is well cast to give their lines / cookie-cutter roles weight just by their presences, and then they actually came to act as well. And yeah, I know it’s fun to knock Sam Worthington for being fairly cookie-cutter in the first place, but I feel like that stemmed from him initially being miscast in big budget actioners: his David Burroughs is, on paper, an absolute nothingburger of a character, but Worthington gives him the right balance of motivation and last-strawness to make his plight watchable.

That’s the curse of all these Coben things, of course: they’re pretty watchable. I Will Find You is less so than normal, due to it never selling its premise really, and Hull just assuming you’re going to binge this over the weekend like the filthy Coben-head you are, so who gives a fig about dividing up the episodes to have cliffhangers, but you wrap back around to Worthington and Britt Lower and Milo Ventimiglia and Chi McBride and Madeleine Stowe fully showing up… I mean, I can’t tell you if I binged it just to get through it or what, but I added to the viewship numbers.

In I Will Find You, David Burroughs has been in jail for the past five years for the brutal murder of his son. Only… he claims it wasn’t him. When his sister-in-law (Lower) shows up with a current picture of a boy with OMG the same exact cheek birthmark as David’s son, they’re both auto-convinced of the only logical conclusion: David’s son is still alive. Next step is to get out of jail and prove it. Probably there’s a conspiracy; probably everyone’s involved; y’know – Coben shit. Tune in next time!