Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Stranger’ On Netflix, Where A Mysterious Woman Has Info That Blows Up A Man’s Life

Harlan Coben’s novels are twisty, with lots of characters harboring secrets, especially in seemingly-normal and bucolic suburban towns. But translating those worlds to TV has proven difficult; 2018’s Safe, for instance, was too twisty for its own good. And his latest Netflix series, The Stranger, has a ton of characters to service. Will it be a good potboiler or just a pain to keep track of?

THE STRANGER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Overhead shots of a British town at night. Then we see teens drinking and dancing around a bonfire in the woods. Suddenly, we then see a naked teenager run through the woods, and the shot of a white alpaca. Not sure were we’re going? Neither are we.

The Gist: Adam Price (Richard Armitage) is a lawyer who is seemingly living the life, in a seemingly happy marriage with his wife Corrine (Dervla Kirwan); their teenage sons Thomas (Jacob Dudman) and Ryan (Misha Handley) are athletic and popular. We see him at a soccer league tryout — a dads vs. lads game — to determine which teams Ryan and his mates will land on. Corrine is at a teacher’s conference, teasing Adam over the phone about how “rough” it is (she just came from a relaxing bath).

At the football club after the game, the parents are having some beers while the kids hang out, when a stranger (Hannah John-Kamen) comes up to Adam and says that Corrine’s last pregnancy in 2017, which ended in a miscarriage, was completely faked, done to keep Adam from leaving her. Adam, of course, dismisses her, but she gives him the name of a Visa charge to look up to prove her point. Also, she ominously tells Adam to find out about the boys’ lineage.

This throws Adam for a loop, but he’s trying to keep things together; after all, he loves and trusts Corrine, but flashbacks to the pregnancy, where she never let him see her naked, rankle him. He finds the ultrasounds of the boys and the miscarried child; the most recent one looks different than the other two. So he looks up the charge, and later finds out the company is a shell name for a website offering fake pregnancy bellies and ultrasound pictures. After Corrine comes home from the trip, he confronts her. She doesn’t deny things, but won’t talk about it during an argument.

Meanwhile, DS Johanna Griffin (Siobhan Finneran) is celebrating the fact that she has told her husband their marriage is over; she’s on a call with her friend Heidi (Jennifer Saunders) when “the infant” calls. It’s her young partner, DC Wesley Ross (Kadiff Krwan); a call has come in that a decapitated llama or alpaca has been found in the town square, with a bite mark on its leg. As they investigate, Ross finds scattered clothes in the wooded area along a road, which leads them to one of Thomas’ classmates, naked and unconscious, but remarkably still alive.

Our Take: The Stranger is based on Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name; Coben is one of the executive producers of the series, which was adapted for TV by Danny Brocklehurst, who collaborated with Coben on Safe. It’s your typical Coben yarn, with multiple and seemingly unrelated threads going on at once, characters who have dark secrets that are alluded to but not mentioned outright until enough tension is drawn out, and mysteries upon mysteries.

And just like Safe, it feels like Coben and Brocklehurst are trying to tie too many stories together, make too many twists and turns, to make us care at all about this mystery. We liked all of the performances, especially the wry Finneran, who is eager to start her new life while still trying to be the best detective she could be, and the always-enjoyable Saunders as her best friend. We’re just not sure how the dead boy and decapitated alpaca factors into the story where Adam tries to chase down Corrine to see what actually happened during that “pregnancy”.

There’s another area where we have issues with the first episode; Corrine keeps telling Adam, “I want to talk to you about it, but now isn’t a good time,” and then disappears to give him and the boys some space. So the tension is now more about where Corrine is and if Adam can find her, not as much about why she faked her pregnancy. It feels like an artificial means to build mystery, and we hope this has a good payoff down the road.

There are more characters we haven’t mentioned, like Thomas’ party-going buddy Mike Tripp (Brandon Fellows), Tom’s girlfriend Daisy Hoy (Ella-Rae Smith) and her very sad little sister Ella (India Brown). It feels like a lot, and we get the feeling that the storytelling is going to get thin in order to cover them all or some of these characters will be underutilized. It’s that lack of focus that makes us wonder if that’ll kill all the thrills that will come in later episodes.

Sex and Skin: Tom and Daisy make out in his room, but that’s about it.

Parting Shot: We see a bloody alpaca head in Tom’s closet, and then we see the stranger start to follow Heidi as she closes up her cafe.

Sleeper Star: Hannah John-Kamen is quite creepy as The Stranger, who looks like will be blowing up multiple lives around this small town with these secrets that she somehow knows. Will we ever find out who she is and why she knows this stuff?

Most Pilot-y Line: When Johanna asks the alpaca farmer if she has any CCTV, she snidely (and stupidly) goes, “This is an alpaca farm, not Port Knox.” This is then explained: “Fort Knox is where the Americans keep the gold, not Port Knox,” Johanna explains to Wes. “I know,” he says. “You do?” she asks, surprised. “No, wait… I was thinking of Alcatraz,” he replies. What?

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Stranger is better than Safe, but it’s still too needlessly complex, and doesn’t give its main story time to breathe.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream The Stranger On Netflix