There have been over a dozen series based on Harlan Coben books. After seeing several of them over the past few years, certain patterns are starting to emerge and certain similarities are beginning to pop out. The basic premise here is that a father is convicted of killing his son. However, it's suspected that his son is still alive, so it basically becomes a missing person case and a greater conspiracy. Shelter (2023) on Prime Video is essentially the reverse. Spoiler alert for Shelter, a son thinks his father has been killed, but it's revealed at the end that his father is alive. In Fool Me Once (2024), another Coben adaptation on Netflix, a wife thinks her husband was killed. However, she suspects that he's alive when his image appears in a current video. That same thing happens here when the image of the so-called murdered son appears in a current photograph. In Missing You (2025), last year's hit Coben adaptation, a woman searches for her missing love-interest and uncovers a greater conspiracy. Earlier this year, Run Away (2026) was a Coben-based series that was specifically about a father searching for his missing child. In that case, it was a father looking for his adult daughter. Here, it's a father searching for his prepubescent son.
What distinguishes this series from all those others is that the person who has to do the searching is a convicted felon, convicted of killing the person for whom he's searching. The protagonists in the previous series are free to go anywhere and do anything. That's not the case here. The protagonist here kicks off the narrative locked up in prison. He can't just go anywhere and do anything. It's also comparable to the beginning of ABC's The Fugitive (1963), which was later adapted into a 1993 film, starring Harrison Ford. Here, Sam Worthington (Clash of the Titans and Avatar) stars as David Burroughs, a former law professor who was convicted of killing his toddler son. He serves five years before he gets a hint that his son wasn't killed at all, meaning David was framed. He's related to people in the Boston Police Department. He could have them investigate, but whoever framed David also wants him dead, so David has to escape and go on the run in order to figure out who's behind all of this.
Britt Lower (Severance and Man Seeking Woman) co-stars as Rachel Mills, a reporter for The Boston Globe. She's also a professor at a college just outside Boston. A friend of hers took pictures at the Six Flags in Massachusetts and in the background of one of the pictures, Rachel noticed a little boy that looks like Matthew, the murdered son of David, five years after said murder. Being an investigative reporter, Rachel leads the charge to figure out if that little boy is in fact Matthew. There's strong, coincidental evidence that it could be Matthew, which wouldn't necessarily be enough to motivate her, but she has believed David's innocence, if not been vocal about it over the past five years. Why does she care? She cares because Rachel is actually Matthew's aunt. She's David's sister-in-law.
The narrative is well written in that it's sufficiently tense. There are all kinds of twists and turns. The investigation is handled in large part due to Rachel's help, but she has a lot of conflicts along the way because it gets to a point where she's aiding and abetting a fugitive. She becomes targeted herself by people trying to kill her. She's also under pressure from her editor at The Boston Globe because he wants to run the story of David's escape from prison and the puzzle pieces being put together. Yet, she doesn't want to run the story because the FBI is actively hunting David and a newspaper story like that would put her and David, as well as possibly Matthew in danger. There's a small debate about journalistic ethics. Lower gives an incredible performance through all of it. Her character becomes actually more interesting than that of Worthington's.
Logan Browning (Dear White People and Hit the Floor) also co-stars as Sarah Greer, the FBI agent who is assigned to the case of David's escape. She's responsible for finding and capturing him. She has a partner on this case and that partner is her father, Max Williams, played by Chi McBride (Hawaii Five-0 and Boston Public). She's ambitious and wants to advance at the bureau. She doesn't want to be in her father's shadow, but, at the same time, she loves her father and doesn't want to be too far away from him. She's also very protective of him. Her father is more by the book than her. She can be by the book, but she starts to pick up clues that maybe David isn't guilty and they're hunting a wrongly convicted man.
Her role provides a good cat-and-mouse aspect to this narrative. It also provides for some decent action, as she has to chase David at times literally, running across rooftops or through various places. In one scene, there's even a crazy shootout between Sarah and those that are ostensibly protecting David. For someone who is a convicted child murderer, David finds himself with a lot of help than one might assume. It makes sense as each episode plays out, but the ending of this series puts a lot of that help into question, and not purposefully. When the truth is revealed at the end, it's convoluted, as can be expected with a Coben-based story. Previous Coben adaptations had villains who did things that made more sense. The villain here is nothing more than a ridiculous psychopath that did what the plot here demands for very lame or stupid reasons. That being said, the winding road to get there was a fun or thrilling ride, and I loved watching Browning and McBride take that journey.
Rated TV-MA-LV.
Running Time: 35-47 mins. / 8 eps.
Available on Netflix.
