Netflix’s all-time top 10 English language series chart is starting to look like a stale old thing. It is topped by Wednesday, which is four years old, and includes dusty old hits including Stranger Things season four (four years old), Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (four years old), The Queen’s Gambit (six years old), and Bridgerton season one (six years old).
But wait. Just before you write off Netflix as a platform half a decade past its peak, a plucky new entry has entered the all-time top 10 to liven things up. That show is I Will Find You, the latest belched out from the glistening ovipositor of Harlan Coben. If you’re a fan of Coben’s work – and we’ll get into that in due course – then I Will Find You will be instantly recognisable, since it bears many of the author’s hallmarks.
Does it have a cast so confusing that your brain needs to take a few moments to adjust to it? Yes. Does it have a title that appears to be picked at random from a tombola barrel filled with the world’s least descriptive words? Absolutely. Do you have a sense when you’re watching it that your television has deliberately left Netflix and put ITV3 on just to see if you’re paying attention? Oh heavens yes. But it is so popular that you end up worrying that you’re the only person alive who doesn’t actively enjoy it? The numbers speak for themselves.
Functionally, there is not much separating I Will Find You from any of the previous 12 Netflix Coben adaptations, like Hold Tight or Fool Me Once or Stay Close or Run Away or Missing You (or even any of the shows he made with other platforms, like Sky’s The Five or Prime’s Harlan Coben’s Shelter). And, indeed, these were all extremely popular too. While the newest show leads with 101.9m worldwide views, 2024’s Fool Me Once gained 98.2m, with 2025’s Missing You and this year’s Run Away both getting over 50m views.
This isn’t surprising, given that Coben is a phenomenally successful writer, who has sold more than 90m books in his 30-year career. What might be more surprising, though, is the fact that almost nobody professes to be a fan of his. Compare the reaction to his work to that of George RR Martin, or Lee Child, or even Anne Rice during her lifetime – authors who inspire fervent, noisy support in their fans – and you’ll see the difference.
This might be Coben’s appeal, in fact. Rather than develop a cult of personality, he just unfussily gets on with the job of churning out one potboiler after another, and is presumably rewarded with riches beyond his wildest dreams. But this does nothing to change the assumption that people consume his shows without ever fully loving them.
Part of this, I’m convinced, is down to the scattershot casting of his adaptations, which seem to hoover up whichever actor happens to be at a loose end at any given point in time. I Will Find You is a perfect case in point. It stars Britt Lower, brilliant in Severance, who until recently had been curating a career playing spiky oddballs in work that went out of its way to confound viewers. But here she is, playing a flat plot device in the sort of show that feels like it was designed to be the fourth thing you watch on a long haul flight.
The glut of Netflix adaptations has made Coben extremely wealthy – in 2018 he signed a multimillion-dollar deal to see 14 of his novels developed into content – but he cannot write quickly enough to keep up with the pace of adaptation. He still has some unadapted books in the tank, like Play Dead and Miracle Cure and last year’s Gone Before Goodbye (although since that last one was apparently co-written with Reese Witherspoon, it has to be a matter of time). However, this all might be about to change with the news that an adaptation of his Myron Bolitar books has just started filming.
This is potentially the lodestar. Despite having a name that sounds like someone choking on some fish, Myron Bolitar is Coben’s best-loved character. A hotheaded basketball player turned agent, who finds himself investigating murders on the side, Bolitar has been the subject of 12 books (along with a handful of young adult books about Myron’s nephew Mickey), and is essentially Coben’s Jack Reacher.
If Bolitar lands with anything like the impact of I Will Find You, its recurring premise and cast (including Colin Woodell from Pulse, Chloe Fineman from Saturday Night Live and Griffin Dunne from being Griffin Dunne) will probably help it grow over the course of several years. In other words, don’t be surprised if it becomes Harlan Coben’s biggest hit yet. Just don’t be surprised if you can’t find anyone who will actually admit liking it.
