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.