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About 15 minutes into the first episode of Fool Me Once, Michelle Keegan’s Maya gets pepper sprayed in the face by her daughter’s childminder, after the pair have come to blows over a hidden camera disguised as a digital photo frame. I practically whooped with glee. Not because Keegan’s character, a newly widowed army veteran, seemed particularly deserving of comeuppance (she’d just buried her murdered husband, for goodness sake), but because the casual inclusion of a scene so objectively bonkers so early on in this eight-part Netflix series felt like a good omen. From here, things surely would only get sillier and more credulity-stretching. In short, I was going to get precisely what I wanted from the streamer’s latest Harlan Coben adaptation.

If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Coben, whose name hovers over the title cards of his TV shows to remind us who’s the boss, then your Netflix algorithm is certainly more discerning than mine. All you need to know is this: Coben is the vastly successful American author of 35 mystery novels, and is a fixture on bestseller lists around the world. As a student at Amherst College in Massachusetts, he was a member of the same fraternity as Dan Brown, writer of The Da Vinci Code and overlord of the airport thriller.

Coben’s books tend to take place in monied communities in New York and neighbouring New Jersey, his home state, rather than in dusty museum archives and crypts, but he shares a taste for cliffhangers and bold twists with his old classmate (“If you don’t like twists and turns, I’m not your guy,” he told The Scotsman last year). In 2018, he signed a five-year mega-deal with Netflix, allowing the streamer to adapt 14 of his novels into English and foreign-language TV series. Fool Me Once is the fourth English production, following Safe (2018), The Stranger (2020) and Stay Close (2022), but there are also shows in French, Spanish and Polish.

These dramas are inevitably chock full of gasp-inducing, head-scratching moments (like poor Michelle being temporarily blinded with an aerosol). And instead of being set against their original backdrop (the New York tri-state area) the English-speaking adaptations of Coben’s work all take place in the northwest of England. Their exact location is never spelled out in the scripts (“We think it works better to make it more generic,” executive producer Nicola Shindler has said) but the gratuitous shots of the Runcorn-Widnes Bridge are a massive giveaway. Transplanting essentially American characters into a very British setting gives proceedings an uncanny, slightly artificial feel. Keegan’s character spends most of her time training amateurs to drive helicopters and at the shooting range, which doesn’t ring entirely true. Sometimes the character names are jarring, albeit in an enjoyable way. In The Five, an original drama that Coben created for Sky back in 2016, pre-Netflix deal, the actor Lee Ingleby plays a man named Slade; perhaps his fictional parents were just devoted fans of Noddy Holder and co.

The critical verdict on these adaptations is as up, down and frankly all over the place as some of Coben’s wilder narrative impulses. They’ve been praised as the ultimate guilty pleasure (in a four-star review of Fool Me Once, The Telegraph claimed its plot “moves like a slinky on steroids”, ie erratically and at speed) and derided as “junk food television” (The i), the TV version of empty calories: stories that are delicious in the moment, but ultimately leave you feeling unsatisfied and a bit grotty. The Independent’s chief TV critic Nick Hilton gave it just one star, predicting that tolerance for its high melodrama “will hinge entirely on your ability to switch off your brain and allow proceedings to wash over you”.

But while they might have divided reviewers, they seem to get a pretty resounding thumbs up from Netflix users. Fool Me Once has just been named as the streamer’s global most watched series of 2024, clocking up more than 107 million views. Are these shows good, bad, or so bad they’re good? And why are viewers like me so hooked? The average Coben series is an inviting mix of the unpredictable and the enjoyably formulaic, a bit like an Agatha Christie. We know pretty much what we’ve signed up for; we’re just not entirely sure of the particulars of how things will play out. So twisty is his work that once the final end credits have rolled, it is categorically impossible to recall the specifics of each series’ storylines. Instead, they become tangled up into one big, chaotic spiderweb (remember those biology GCSE textbook pictures imagining what webs spun by drugged-up spiders might look like?)

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The typical plot goes something like this. A woman is, or once was, romantically involved with Richard Armitage, the actor who is the undisputed king of the Harlan Coben TV Universe, with three such series on his CV (“Three’s enough, if not too many!” he told Radio Times last year, in 2023, only to sign up for yet another one a few months back). She is hiding a dark secret, one that connects her to a spate of mysterious disappearances, or a murder investigation that has long gone cold. The Armitage character walks straight into this conspiracy and sets about trying to solve things for himself, usually while pursued by baddies. He is alternately helped and held back by an odd-couple pair of police officers.

For a touch of British Big Little Lies, everyone lives in massive detached homes, and has gorgeous hair that belies their emotional turmoil. There are various convoluted backstories involving childhood games gone wrong, mask-wearing cults or alpacas. Something tends to be awry at the local kids’ football club, where the parents gather to speak in exposition from the sidelines. And if there’s a beloved British comedy star on the cast list – Jennifer Saunders in The Stranger, Eddie Izzard in Stay Close – the odds of them making it to the final episode are high.

In Fool Me Once, there’s a slight shake up: this time, the Armitage character is a dead husband who appears in flashback (or, at least, he’s supposed to be dead – but he still crops up in footage recorded on the sneaky photo frame camera after his funeral). And it’s his widow Maya, played by Keegan, who must do the amateur sleuthing. She’s also burdened by secrets of her own. They relate to her time in the army, we learn, and place her at the mercy of a whistleblower called “Corey the Whistle”, who writes a blog from a shack in the forest. And some adaptations don’t feature Armitage at all.

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In 2018’s Safe, it’s Dexter star Michael C Hall who plays the moody bloke with the dead wife, doing his best British accent. The Five has a quartet of protagonists, who are shaken to learn that the DNA of their long-missing friend has turned up at a crime scene. What they all share, though, is a fast pace and the sort of stress-inducing episode endings that have you pressing “next” against your better judgement. That’s testament not just to Coben’s mad plots but also to screenwriter Danny Brocklehurst’s command of the source material; Brocklehurst has worked on all five English-language Coben adaptations, so has had plenty of practice when it comes to shaping these stories into moreish nuggets.

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Trope-y tales like these mean that the vast line-up of characters are often pretty broadly drawn. But they’re consistently elevated by some of Britain’s most recognisable television performers. As well as Keegan and Armitage, Fool Me Once also features Joanna Lumley as Maya’s wealthy mother-in-law, an acid-tongued matriarch who wafts around the family estate swathed in cashmere scarves, and Sherwood’s Adeel Akhtar as a police officer who keeps mysteriously passing out at the wheel of his car. Stay Close starred Cush Jumbo, who’s more often found performing Shakespeare in the West End.

These shows are, let’s face it, probably not the most challenging dramatic material that they’ve tackled, but it’s fun to see which stars will be called up for the next production, like a thespy form of jury service. In fact, with their impressive cast lists, mega mansions and ridiculous narrative curveballs, they’re essentially a fun-house mirror version of your average ITV psychological thriller, buoyed by a Netflix budget to amp up the escapism. No wonder British audiences can’t get enough of this all-American author. Long may the Harlan-verse continue – and here’s hoping Richard Armitage is on the phone to his agent right now.

Joker: Folie à Deux, reviewed by SIddhant Adlakha. Narrated by Erik Adams.

The worst thing about Joker: Folie à Deux is its unfulfilled potential. It begins with the promise of a novel approach to the Joker and Harley Quinn, placing them in a world where the opposite of cruelty is musical romance. Unfortunately, the DC sequel gets bogged down by a lengthy courtroom saga, which not only keeps the dazzling Lady Gaga away from the spotlight, but centers the movie entirely around its own predecessor, without doing or saying anything new.

I Am Your Beast reviewed by Tristan Ogilvie on PC.

“I Am Your Beast is a stirring, snack-sized shoot ‘em up that succeeds in spite of its simplified story and slightly punitive progression. Its supremely responsive controls and readily available arsenal of pick-up-and-slay weapons made me feel like a one-man army unleashed on groups of unsuspecting enemies, while its strict time-based goals and bonus objectives gave me reason to return to most of its levels to continually refine my approach. It may lack a truly unique hook to put it head and shoulders above the pack, but I Am Your Beast was still furious enough to sink its claws into me and keep me gripped to it throughout its short stay.”

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Netflix series Wednesday will return with its long-awaited second season after becoming one of the streaming giant’s most successful titles.

The Addams Family spin-off, created by Smallville’s Al Gough and Miles Millar with direction by Edward Scissorhands filmmaker Tim Burton, centres on Wednesday Addams, a deadpan teenage girl with psychic abilities trying to solve a murder mystery.

The show broke records when it debuted in November 2022 and follows Jenna Ortega playing the titular character first brought to life by Lisa Loring in the 1960s series, and later Christina Ricci in the 1991 feature film.

Now, a new behind-the-scenes Netflix teaser has just promised it will be “bigger and more twisted”.

“If we showed you any more, your eyes would bleed, and I’m not that generous,” says Ortega in the clip as her character teases, “Let’s play dolls”.

Here’s everything we know about Wednesday season two.

When will it be released?

The series release has been delayed by the Hollywood writers strikes, and although it was previously reported that production could be sped up to ensure a 2024 release, Deadline reported fans could expect a 2025 release at the earliest.

Netflix has not confirmed an official release date but the show is expected to begin filming in Ireland this month – a change from its original location in Romania.

Who will be in it?

Jenna Ortega has confirmed she will be returning as Wednesday and her best friend Enid Sinclair (played by Emma Meyer) is also expected to return as creators hinted the next season would explore their friendship further.

While the rest of the cast has not been announced, it was revealed in April that Reservoir Dogs and Fargo star Steve Buscemi would be joining the cast.

Ortega’s love interest Xavier Thorpe (Percy Hynes White) was reportedly written out of the series after being accused of sexual misconduct – claims he has vehemently denied.

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What will it be about?

Creators Gough and Miller hinted additional relatives could be added to the cast, suggesting the Addams family could play a more central role in the plotline.

Season one set in Wednesday’s school Nevermore, focused on her schoolmates and romantic interests, but the finale ends with the institution shutting down.

The show consciously tied up all loose ends on the mystery of the Hyde in the first season in order to “begin with a whole new mystery next season”, suggesting Wednesday could be drawn into another investigation.

Fans of Wednesday’s love triangles will be disappointed to hear that the second season will drop any romance, opting instead to lean into the more whimsical elements of horror.

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“We’ve decided we want to lean into the horror aspect of the show a little bit more,” Ortega told Variety. “Because it is so lighthearted, and a show like this with vampires and werewolves and superpowers, you don’t want to take yourself too seriously.”

She added: “We’re ditching any romantic love interest for Wednesday, which is really great.”

As well as digging deeper into themes of friendship, the show’s creators hope to explore Wednesday and her mother Morticia’s relationship.

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“We wanna sort of explore and sort of complicate all of those relationships going forward,” the creators told The Hollywood Reporter.

“For us, the show also is really about this female friendship, with Wednesday and Enid really being at the centre of that. The fact that they really connected with audiences, it has been really gratifying. So, we’re excited to explore now that Wednesday’s dipped her toe into the friendship pool, what’s that gonna look like? It’s like, she hugged. That was her big arc for the season.

“Then, the other thing that’s really interesting is to continue to explore the Wednesday-Morticia mother-daughter relationship as well, which now that Morticia knows about the power, it has given her sort of an idea of how that’s going to go. How is their relationship going to evolve?”

Zeta-Jones promised: “This season is going to bigger and more twisted than you can ever imagine.”