Fool Me Once (Netflix series, 2024)

Happy New Year! And if it’s a new year, it must be time for a new Harlan Coben series. The binge-worthy Fool Me Once is based on his eponymous crime novel from 2016.

The English-language Netflix-adaptations of Coben’s work are usually transplanted from the US to Britain, and Fool Me Once (adapted by Danny Brocklehurst) is no exception.

The series was mostly filmed in and around Manchester and follows Maya Stern (Michelle Keegan), whose husband Joe (Richard Armitage) was recently murdered during a nightly walk in the park.

As Maya was too shocked to cope, she left all the funeral arrangements to her mother-in-law, Judith Burkett (Joanna Lumley), and never saw his dead body again.

So imagine her surprise a couple of weeks later, when Maya sees a man who looks exactly like Joe on the footage from the nanny-cam she installed to keep an eye on her young daughter Lily.

Is Joe alive or did Maya just imagine this? Is she going crazy, due to grief and other mental problems, or is someone playing a cruel trick on her?

And to add to this: how does the wealthy Burkett-family fit into all this? And what about Maya’s own past as a military operator whose career went south after an operation in Iraq went horribly wrong?

Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) is trying to solve Joe's murder, while also dealing with his own personal troubles, like getting married in four weeks, but more importantly, crashing his car due to an apparent black-out.

Still, he’s going to do his job. And although Kierce sympathizes with Maya’s loss, it is clear that to him she is also a possible suspect in the case.

In another storyline Maya is trying to find out what happened to her sister Claire, who was killed several months before Joe. It’s all a bit much to be purely coincidental. And as Claire’s husband remarks at one point: ‘Death seems to follow you around, Maya.’

So are the two cases connected? 

Well, if you’ve seen earlier Harlan Coben-series like The Stranger (2020) or Stay Close (2021) - both of which also featured the great Richard Armitage - you will have good reason to suppose that everything is indeed connected.

Coben-series usually take place in  suburbia, where the comfortable lives of its (upper) middle class residents are upended by secrets from the past.

Or to use a famous quote from Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia: ‘We may be through with the past, but the past isn’t through with us’.

Another theme Coben likes to explore is something that Hitchcock was also famous for: the innocent man (or woman) who has to clear his or her name.

And then there is the technology aspect: Coben likes to warn us (in a ‘careful what you wish for’ way) about the dangers of modern technology, like in this case, the nanny cam. The mysterious recording of Joe soon gets lost and when Maya keeps talking about it, it just makes people question her mental abilities.

Still, Maya is not one to be trifled with. She is a tough cookie, and an expert shooter, who can more than hold her own. Former Coronation Street-star Keegan is excellent in this leading role, while Lumley is, as always, absolutely fabulous in the role of the matriarch, whose family harbors secrets from decades ago.

I have to admit: I’m a sucker for these kind of shows. To me, Harlan Coben-series are the epitome of the ‘gourmet cheeseburgers’ that Netflix likes to serve its subscribers.

They are nice and tasty, and totally worth the binge. Based on the first couple of episodes, Fool Me Once is no different. The cast is super fine, the English surroundings always look great and the story has got enough twists and turns to keep you hooked!