If you glance at Netflix's top 10 TV shows of the week, chances are you'll see Harlan Coben's name multiple times. His latest offering, Fool Me Once, has orbited the top of the list since its New Year's Day launch, bringing with it a cohort of previous shows based on the crime writer's past works (The Stranger, Safe, Stay Close, The Woods, to name just a few). Now, yet another two shows from the writer have been greenlit: Missing You and Run Away, with production set to commence in the next couple of months. By the end of the year, that'll be 10 Harlan Coben adaptations.
Since 2016, Coben's particular brand of water cooler-lite crime thriller has become a Netflix staple. They're all much of a muchness; vaguely sinister names written in block white letters (you can practically hear the invisible ‘dun dun DUN’ musical sting after titles like The Stranger or Fool Me Once), a cavalcade of recognisable British small screen faces, usually led by Richard Armitage, who's become the brooding and angular Tom Hanks to Coben's Robert Zemeckis, starring in three of his series so far, and tense domestic melodrama cut with some good old fashioned murder mystery (Fool Me Once, for example, hinges on a widow seeing her recently murdered husband pop up on her secret nanny cam.)
The sheer avalanche of on-screen Harlan Coben worlds is all part of an overall deal the author struck with the streamer in 2018 that would see 14 of his stories adapted into English and other foreign territories. If you're wondering how he's going to come up with even more crime capers, don't worry, he has 33 of these books to his name. All of which begs the question: why do Netflix keep adapting them? And why do we keep watching them?
Over the past five years, Coben has become the premiere auteur of the after-dinner TV scroll. The anti-discourse attention-grabber. The show that's almost-but-not-quite gripping enough to stop you from compulsively reaching for your phone to simultaneously overload your sensory receptors with a trending TikTok sound.
A lot of people you know have probably seen Fool Me Once, but you've probably not heard much about it. No one is dissecting its twists and turns (of which there are aplenty) like they did with more prestige views like Succession or The Last of Us. And they're not mourning its loss once they reach the final episode. That's because Harlan Coben has perfected the art of a show you get obsessed with for three days and then never think about again. Like a greasy takeaway you ravish in the moment, before hiding the evidence in the recycling bin; Throwaway anti-prestige TV that is good for views, but bad for… well, anything beyond a brief dopamine spike.
On Netflix's part, it seems like a wider push to give you even more of the thing you just watched, a model it already replicated with its deluge of three-to-six-episode true crime documentaries and perma-glossed reality TV (it's no secret that the streaming giant is a company built on carefully-tracked data, with very little room for risk-taking). Once upon a time, Netflix was at the vanguard of the binge-able prestige era, with shows like Orange is the New Black, House of Cards and Mindhunter. Now, beyond shows like Stranger Things and Squid Game, which seem to arrive in four-year intervals, they've shifted their lens to prestige TV's less glamorous cousin. It's something Slate recently called ‘trough TV’, meaning the ongoing downward slope of great TV in exchange for shows that simply just do the job of being quite popular and quite successful but without any kind of cultural cache attached.
Harlan Coben's oeuvre is far from the worst thing you'll see on telly. Watching his cut-and-paste glumly suspicious cohort wrestle with life is probably better than mining people's real-life trauma for yet another true crime doc or cringe-inducing dating show. But they're also the epitome of middling trough TV – good enough to warrant a multi-night binge, but not enough to ever feel truly satisfying or worthwhile. And then, once they're over, you'll get another one on your doorstep – just like Uber Eats. There are 33 books to cover, after all.
