I Will Find You: A Review of Netflix's Wheel-Spinning, Pulpy Harlan Coben Thriller
Netflix's latest limited series, I Will Find You, is a modern take on the distracted-viewing show, with a focus on multi-tasking and multi-screen viewership. The show, adapted from Harlan Coben's book, stars Sam Worthington, Britt Lower, Milo Ventimiglia, Erin Richards, Jonathan Tucker, Madeleine Stowe, Logan Browning, and Chi McBride.
The series follows David Burroughs, a father serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of his young son, a crime he vehemently denies committing. The show is built to be watched while doing other things, with a top-notch cast that includes Worthington, Lower, Chi McBride, and Logan Browning.
The show's plot is a mixture of repetition, red herrings, narrative dead-ends, and illogical resolutions. The series' creative team never received a Netflix note saying, "Guys, you're fitting two hours of plot into eight hours of programming, is there any other way we might use this time better?" Instead, the show's mystery structure features stretches in which as many as four different subsets of characters seek the same information and thus follow the same breadcrumbs while announcing their progress simultaneously.
The show's ending, which was not exactly what I expected it to be at any of the various points I made predictions in my notes, only makes sense if you don't ask some very important questions. The series' conclusion is generally fine, in the sense that it's very resolved, but it fails all logic tests.
The show's ensemble cast is really solid, and the capable polish of the directors, including Brad Anderson and Maja Vrvilo, goes a long way toward making I Will Find You feel like less of a rush job than some of the string of Coben adaptations that have flooded Netflix and Amazon in recent years.
In my opinion, I Will Find You is a show that ultimately is designed to be half-watched while keeping track of the World Cup, busy news headlines, and other external stimuli. It's a disposable mixture of repetition, red herrings, narrative dead-ends, and illogical resolutions, but it's generally watchable, amid the irritation.
