Crime novelist Harlan Coben regularly tops bestseller lists in the United States, but in the past 15 years or so, he's become a huge pop-culture brand in Europe. As a result, all of the film and TV adaptations of his work have been produced overseas, primarily for the British and French markets. After picking up some of those adaptations for U.S. audiences, Netflix signed Coben to a massive production deal in 2018. The first product of that agreement is the eight-episode miniseries The Stranger, created by Coben and based on his 2015 novel. Although Netflix is now the main production company behind the show, The Stranger sticks with the formula that worked for previous U.K.-based Coben series The Five and Safe.
Writer-producer Danny Brocklehurst, who was the showrunner on both previous series, returns for The Stranger, and once again the setting of the story has been moved to England, although Coben's novel was set in New Jersey. The cultural changes are relatively minimal, however, and Coben's story remains pretty much the same: A mysterious stranger approaches various people to reveal dark secrets about them or someone close to them, setting in motion events involving murder, blackmail and betrayal.
Here, the gender of the Stranger (Hannah John-Kamen) has been flipped. Yet, she's more of a plot device than a person in the show's first half, until the fifth episode starts to depict a bit of her home life.
The series' real main character is lawyer and suburban dad Adam Price (Richard Armitage), who learns from the Stranger that his wife Corinne (Dervla Kirwan) faked a pregnancy and miscarriage a few years earlier, leading him to question the validity of his marriage and the parentage of his two sons. Soon Corinne goes missing, and local police detective Johanna Griffin (Siobhan Finneran) starts putting together pieces from various seemingly related cases, including the beating of a local teen and the murder of one of Johanna's closest friends.
Like all Coben miniseries (which also include the French productions No Second Chance and Just One Look), The Stranger is packed with red herrings and narrative detours. Keeping the audience guessing over the course of eight episodes necessitates leading viewers down a variety of dead-end paths. The Five's 10 episodes proved to be too many, and even eight are perhaps more than is needed to tell a full story without straying too far from the central mystery. But at least in its first half or so, The Stranger is more tightly focused than Coben and Brocklehurst's previous collaborations, with plot threads that generally all feed back into the central story of the Stranger and her victims.
It also helps that any time the plot lags, the Stranger can approach someone new and knock over another domino in what appears to be a very interconnected community. The story doesn't break any new ground for Coben's work, dealing with familiar themes of buried secrets and hidden anger, and Armitage's stubborn, hard-working professional and family man is pretty similar to the stubborn, hard-working professional and family man played by Michael C. Hall in Safe. The same goes for Finneran's dogged, upstanding police detective with a personal connection to the case. The Stranger even has similar weak comic relief from Johanna's quirky partner on the force.
Even if his plots are often similar, Coben is great at crafting page-turning suspense, and his TV series are the onscreen equivalent. Each episode of The Stranger ends with a cliffhanger that makes it virtually impossible not to continue watching, and even if some of the revelations turn out to be underwhelming, there's always enough pulpy, soapy intrigue to keep things going. Characters never tell each other the whole truth if they can instead tantalizingly withhold information for later. "This isn't what you think. There's more to this," Corinne tells Adam shortly before going missing. And that tease of finding out the real story then hangs over all the subsequent episodes as Adam frantically searches for his wife.
Armitage, best known to American audiences for his role as Thorin Oakenshield in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy, gives a solid performance as the driven but somewhat dull Adam. Finneran is a more compelling lead as the emotionally open Johanna, who isn't your typical TV-show cop.
More recognizable faces show up in supporting roles, including Stephen Rea as one of Adam's clients, a grouchy old man who refuses to sell his longtime home to developers, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Anthony Head as Adam's jerk of a dad, one of the sleazy developers trying to bulldoze a beloved old neighborhood. Absolutely Fabulous' Jennifer Saunders takes on a rare dramatic role as one of the Stranger's victims, but she doesn't get enough screen time to make an impression.
Clearly the Coben brand has been working out well for Netflix (he even gets a possessive credit above the title), and there's no reason for The Stranger to mess with success. Coben himself has a wordless cameo as a police technician in one episode, and his daughter, Charlotte, is on the show's writing staff.
Anyone who binged The Five or Safe is likely to do the same with The Stranger, which delivers the same sort of empty-calorie thrills. Coben, who signed on to adapt at least 14 of his novels, may need to vary things eventually, but for now, the formula holds up.
Starring Richard Armitage, Siobhan Finneran, Hannah John-Kamen, Jennifer Saunders, Shaun Dooley, Dervla Kirwan, Paul Kaye, Anthony Head and Stephen Rea, all eight episodes of The Stranger debut Thursday on Netflix.