Stream It Or Skip It?

In a tradition that’s gone back for the last few years, Netflix is debuting another adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel on New Year’s Day. This time, it’s Run Away, where a father looking for his wayward daughter finds out dark secrets about people he thought he knew, including loved ones.

RUN AWAY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: A girl in a purple varsity jacket walks around a college campus. She goes up some stairs and encounters a man in a ski mask. Then we see flashes of that man bashing someone else in the head.

The Gist: A year later, we see Simon Greene (James Nesbitt) getting ready for work, talking to his youngest daughter Anya (Ellie Henry) about her homework and kissing his pediatrician wife, Ingrid (Minnie Driver) goodbye. But he’s not necessarily going to work; he’s in a park, on a tip about where he can find his older daughter Paige (Ellie De Lange). He hasn’t seen her in six months, as she’s descended into drugs and petty crime with her boyfriend, Aaron Corval (Thomas Flynn).

When he sees her busking, he approaches Paige, but she runs. When Aaron comes out of the trees to confront Simon, he coldcocks Simon and kicks him while he’s down, an incident that’s recorded by multiple people on their phones, with the video from it going viral.

Police detectives Isaac Fagbenle (Alfred Enoch) and Ruby Todd (Amy Gledhill) are called to the scene of a violent murder: Aaron Corval. Given the viral video, it doesn’t take them long to suspect Simon. When he’s questioned by Fagbenle and Todd, though, he insists he didn’t do it.

In the meantime, we see private investigator Elena Ravenscroft (Ruth Jones) following a restaurant owner, Maria Finchley (Chanel Waddock). She’s also hired by Sebastian Thorpe (Simon Thorp), a businessman whose son has been missing for about a week.

Simon and Ingrid take it upon themselves to see where Paige might have gone. They go to Aaron’s apartment — a crime scene — and talk to a friend of Paige’s, a neighbor named Cornelius Faber (Lucian Msamati). That leads them to a basement in another building, and a confrontation with a drug dealer named Rocco (Marcus Fraser).

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Run Away, written by Danny Brocklehurst, is similar to most of the Netflix adaptations of Harlan Coben’s novels, like Missing You and Fool Me Once.

Our Take: Brocklehurst has been a good partner for Coben on these adaptations because he is able to carve solid thrillers with good actors out of Coben’s twisty stories. Run Away follows the same playbook as Fool Me Once (also written by Brocklehurst) and many of the other Coben adaptations by combining twists, extreme emotions, and some light humor.

In the first episode, we are introduced to so many characters that it makes your head spin. In the Gist section above we didn’t even mention Ash (Jon Pointing) and Dee Dee (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), who seem to be partners in contract killing, Simon’s sister-in-law/business partner Yvonne Previdi (Ingrid Oliver), or his oldest, college-student son Sam (Adrian Greensmith); all of them are involved in their own seemingly disparate stories that we know will somehow come together later in the season.

It’s almost too much to keep up with. But knowing how Brocklehurst and Coben have partnered in the past, it stands to reason that there will be reasons for all of these threads to be presented in the first episode.

The role of Simon, as a passionate man who can barely control his rage, is pretty much in Nesbitt’s wheelhouse, but we were wondering why someone as accomplished as Driver was in the “supportive wife” role. But Ingrid not only comes with Simon as they try to figure out where Paige is, but she becomes integral to the story by the end of the second episode. We’ll just say it this way: As you might expect, everyone in this show has secrets, and Ingrid isn’t immune to that.

Some of the light humor seems out of place, especially with Fagbenle, a police detective who seems to talk in axioms like he was straight out of an Agatha Christie novel. At first, we think that his theories are way off, because we see what Simon is doing. But we don’t think that will continue; either he’ll continue to suspect Simon for good reason, or new information will get him and his partner (who is a partner in more ways than one) looking in other directions.

Performance Worth Watching: Like we said above, there’s a reason why Minnie Driver is on this show, and her involvement in these twists and turns has us intrigued.

Sex And Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: The confrontation with Rocco goes awry, resulting in someone being shot, but Rocco isn’t the one who shoots anyone.

Sleeper Star: Annette Badland, whom fans of British crime dramas might recognize from Midsomer Murders, plays Lou, who is Elena’s “techie”. But it seems that she’s also connected to one of Elena’s cases.

Most Pilot-y Line: When we see Fagbenle get a call in bed then see who he’s sleeping with, we rolled our eyes. As if this show needed another complication to its story.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Run Away is another solid Coben thriller with good performances, a little bit of humor and lots of twists. Will it be memorable five seconds after you finish watching it? Probably not. But it’s something good to binge over a weekend.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.