2 hours ago
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I Will Find You ★★★
We’ve long had airport novels, those addictively page-turning, plot-heavy thrillers you pick up en route to the departure lounge, knowing they’ll get you through a good chunk of an international flight, making no great demands on your intellectual powers or emotional reserves while helping you put off sleep until you get to the right time zone.
Now, it seems, we’re in the era of the airport TV series. And you can thank (or blame) streaming – or, at least, the download function that allows you to load up your device for a good six or seven hours of watching midair – for that.
I Will Find You is the airport series par excellence. It stars Sam Worthington as David Burroughs, a man serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of his five-year-old son. Of course, he protests his innocence, but for some reason he has largely opted to do so silently.
His ex-wife Cheryl (Erin Richards, who is excellent throughout) believes he did it, and can barely even utter his name. But her sister Rachel Mills (Britt Lower), a former investigative journalist dealing with her own personal shame, has always believed David was innocent. And when she turns up at the prison with a photo that appears to prove his son is alive, the race to find him, and prove David’s innocence once and for all, is on.
The eight-part series is based on a Harlan Coben novel, and that might be as much as you need to know. Coben has published 35 novels, and claims to have “over 100 million books in print worldwide” in 46 languages. In 2018, he signed a five-year deal with Netflix to turn 14 of those books into screen properties (the deal was extended in 2022). I Will Find You is series No. 12 in that gushing pipeline of content.
If you were feeling charitable, you’d describe this kind of content as highly bingeable and fairly gripping. But if you were feeling a little less charitable, you might think of it as a sewer outlet rather than a pipeline, pumping out effluent stripped of substance as fast as we can consume it.
I Will Find You isn’t the worst thing on TV or streaming right now, but nor is it the best. It’s propulsive and largely implausible. The coincidences and overlaps of character plotlines are ludicrous; the story rests on the sorts of conspiracies only a pulp novelist could invent.
But Coben is a master of plot and emotional manipulations – as my colleague Debi Enker recently noted, his stories are often set in motion by a missing person “often a child or teenager, and this is a trusty and engaging launching pad, featuring increasingly desperate parents and an atmosphere immediately charged with urgency and threat”. Resisting the sense of peril he conjures is all but impossible.
This is in almost every way imaginable a story about families, and especially parent-child bonds. We’ve all got those, right? How can you not feel implicated in some way?
But just because it works doesn’t mean it’s especially good. Worthington is a not terribly compelling leading man; the stoicism that marked him out as one to watch in the 2004 Australian film Somersault has ossified over the years into a kind of stoniness that admits little identification with his character. Besides, there’s never any sense of doubt about David’s innocence, which rather robs the story of the kind of did-he-or-didn’t-he intrigue it could have used.
It’s great to see Britt Lower outside the confines of Lumon Industries, but you can’t help thinking this job must have had her wondering, “Will I ever work on another show as good as Severance?”
As a time filler, there’s nothing especially wrong with I Will Find You. It’s just the kind of show that signals the gulf between “streaming” and “TV” is shrinking, and has perhaps closed almost entirely. The sort of show that, if you could leave it behind in the place you were staying once you were done with it, for the next weary traveller to find, like a dog-eared paperback, you almost certainly would.
I Will Find You streams on Netflix from June 18.
