Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Overlooked TV: Harlan Coben's The Five

Okay, I know it's brand new to the U.S., but how many of you have seen it?  I don't see a lot of mentions of it, so I thought maybe you'd overlooked it.  You shouldn't because we should all support struggling young writers like Harlan Coben.

Okay, so that was a joke.  Harlan's doing just fine, as indicated by the fact that he gets his name above the title.  How often does that happen to a writer?

I'm not sure just how this series of ten episodes came to be written.  I know that Harlan didn't write the individual episodes, but maybe he wrote the overall plan for the series.  The premise is certainly typical Coben.  A child disappears in 1995.  In 2015 his DNA turns up at a murder scene.  The child, Jesse, was out with four others, his brother, Mark, Pru, Slade, and Danny.  Danny's now a police detective, and he's the one who learns about the DNA match.  He calls the others, and the hunt for Jesse is on.  

That's all I have to say about the plot because I don't want to spoil the fun.  It's full of twists, at least two per episode, and I enjoyed every bit of it.  The cast, all British and none of whom I knew, is uniformly excellent, right down to the smallest bits.  There's a hotel keeper whose hilarious overplaying made me wish he'd been in more scenes.  The British accents were no problem at all for me. I didn't even have to turn on the closed-caption feature.

Maybe Harlan Coben's The Five won't be your cuppa, but I highly recommend that you give it a try.  I was hooked from the start.

6 comments:

Jerry House said...

I binge-watched the show this past week. Good stuff. Evidently a sequel titled THE FOUR is in development.

Steve Oerkfitz said...

I watched this last week. I liked it but didn't love it.

Jeff Meyerson said...

It's on our list but we have to finish up a bunch of other stuff first.

Kevin R. Tipple said...

I had a heck of a time fining it listed, but finally found it and added it. Gotta wait till Sandi feels better and is up to watching things before we give it a try.

Jeff Meyerson said...

We do know some of the actors. Slade is Lee Ingleby, Insp. George Gently's assistant on that show, also on Netflix. The married woman Mark is having the affair with is Honeysuckle Weeks, a regular on Foyle's War.

Unknown said...

Honeysuckle Weeks is a great name.