If you're interested in the business behind streaming, here's one tiny, perhaps obvious little trick. You can broadly tell how much power a showrunner or writer has by whether they get a mention in the full title of a show. Tyler Perry's a great example, since his output almost always has his name attached, and now you can add thriller-writer Harlan Coben to the elite, too.
Harlan Coben's I Will Find You might be known by just I Will Find You by 99% of the people who end up watching it, but that doesn't stop the fact that the author's name is clearly a big deal at Netflix after a series of successful outings for the streamer. This new show got a proper full trailer this week, and what a scary-looking time it promises to be!
The show stars Sam Worthington as David, a grieving father who's been convicted for killing his son, while knowing that he did no such thing. When he's approached in prison by a visitor, he's initially reluctant but then unable to ignore her. She's Rachel, played by Severance's Britt Lower, and she seems to have proof that his son never died in the first place.
What was treated as a murder might have been a kidnapping, and that means David has to immediately consider how he's going to get out of prison to start investigating. From the looks of this trailer, the show will therefore divide into a few genres, with at least part of its runtime shaping up as a Prison Break-style escape story.
Once he's out, it would seem we'll be getting more of a traditional mystery thriller from then on, but there are some really intriguing questions floating around even just from the teaser and this new trailer. One of them is quite who Rachel is, and why she knows so much about David's case, and the bigger question is who exactly the abductor is, and what their motivation could be.
It's all very enticing stuff, and I have a pretty good feeling that this will do numbers on Netflix when it comes out – it has all the right ingredients to be a mainstream success. It drops on 18 June, so it's about two weeks away, which means you don't have long to wait to see if I'm right.
