Miss you

Every Breath You Take

Season 1

Episode 1

Editor’s Rating

3 stars

***

Photo: Vishal Sharma/Netflix

If there’s one thing that Netflix really nails, it’s a fast-paced, lively, and exciting series. Something short and sweet – maybe from another country – that everyone can enjoy in a day or two, tell their friends they have to see it because it blew them away, and then forget about it about two weeks later. Think Baby reindeer, Squid gameor even Money graball of which exploded relatively out of the blue and have been leaving waves on the streamer ever since.

That’s exactly what happened Fool me oncethat lit up the service when it was discontinued last New Year’s Day. One can only imagine why Harlan Coben’s adaptation was so successful – critics and audiences alike generally found it pretty meh — but things did so well for the service that Netflix immediately greenlit two more Coben adaptations, including this year’s New Year’s edition. Miss you.

An adaptation of a novel originally set in New York. Miss you tells the story of Detective Inspector Kat Donovan, who lives in Manchester and is charmingly played by Slow horses‘ Rosalind Eleazar. Not only does Kat specialize in missing persons cases, but she was part of one herself when her almost-too-handsome fiancé Josh (Ashley Walters) up and left her a decade earlier, right after the murder of her police officer father. It was a pretty shitty move that apparently cut Kat off from any love after that, but as we learn pretty quickly Miss youIt may have been a bit nefarious in the first episode.

The pieces come together when Kat meets Josh on a dating app called Melody Cupid, which matches you with people based on the music you like. (Why Josh is back in town after such a dick move on the app remains unclear.) Kat strokes right over him, they connect, and she reaches out, looking for closure. He cuts her off and says he doesn’t think it’s a good idea for them to talk.

Around the same time, Kat learns that the evil Monte LeBurne, the assassin who murdered her father, is suffering from a type of fast-acting cancer that leaves him with only a few days to live. She foolishly hires her private investigator best friend to take her to the prison where LeBurne is being held just to get an answer. Monte doesn’t want to see her or anyone else, but the creepy red-lipped nurse who looks after him lets Kat in anyway, because when you die in prison, ethics matters are obviously ignored.

This is only reinforced when Monte calms down and enjoys making Kat cry. His creepy nurse injects him with some kind of morphine-based truth serum and says it will make him sing like a bird within minutes. It works, and Monte, believing Kat to be his sister, tells her that he wasn’t paid to kill her father, but that he took the fall. He was already locked up for two other murders, so what’s a third? Kat is shocked, but anyone with half a brain could have told you that Monte wouldn’t be suitable for this murder one way or another. It is episode one after all. There is more story to tell.

Meanwhile, Kat’s private investigator friend calls her (?) from the prison parking lot to tell her that she has taken the records of everyone who has ever visited Monte. (Keep!) Apparently Josh had been there the day before he got up, abandoning Kat and the town, causing even more aspersions on his character.

However, for Kat, all of this personal drama doesn’t happen in a bubble. She also has daytime job drama with a new young, tech-savvy colleague and a missing man named Rishi, who we see wandering aimlessly through fields rather groggy when he’s not thinking about a dream woman standing blurry against soft light.

I’m skeptical that this girl ever existed; As we see, near the end of the first episode, Rishi is captured and tied up by a guy in a tractor, and when Kat and her partners search the cottage Rishi rented, they find unopened champagne and boxed underwear, as well as a claim that he Even though he had booked the holiday home for two people, he showed up alone. I would bet that the evil rancher Rishi was fishing with the promise of this fuzzy baby, although I’m not sure to what purpose or where and/or if it has anything to do with what happened with Kat, Josh and theirs deceased father is going on. Luckily since the next episode of Miss you is already available on Netflix, waiting for you to reluctantly say, “Oh, well, just one more,” even though it’s way too late at night, none of us will have to wait long to find out.

• I would bet big money that the decision to shoot was made Miss you made in the UK rather than New York City for either budget or logistics reasons, but I love it. There’s something about watching relatively unknown (to us) dramatic actors strolling through cute row houses, outdoor dining areas and big empty farms that I just can’t get enough of. It’s somehow more prestigious and I can’t explain why, but it’s a fact.

• Something about the remaining shots of Kat’s friends at the end of the episode (particularly Mary Malone’s Aqua) made me think they know more than they’re letting on. Richard Armitage’s Stagger, who is Kat’s boss, definitely knows something too. You’ll never convince me otherwise.