Finding the Missing pieces
The latest collaboration between Netflix and thriller author Harlan Coben, Missing You, is described as the most romantic so far. Series writer Victoria Asare-Archer tells DQ how she blended twists and turns with the story of a woman faced with meeting her ex a decade after his disappearance.
From Stay Close and The Stranger to Safe and Fool Me Once – Netflix’s most watched series in 2024 – viewers have been captivated by the streamer’s collaboration with thriller author Harlan Coben’s unique brand of storytelling.
As well as those English-language series on the platform, Coben’s name is also attached to Polish series The Woods and Hold Tight, Spanish show The Innocent and French drama Gone for Good.
Now, the streamer’s latest adaptation of a Coben novel plays with the familiar “wild ride” of twists, turns and surprises to establish itself as what writer Victoria Asare-Archer says is the most “romantic” Netflix-Coben collaboration to date.
Based on the novel of the same name, Missing You introduces detective Kat Donovan, who hasn’t heard from her fiancé Josh – the love of her life – since he suddenly disappeared 11 years ago. Then one day while swiping through profiles on a dating app, she sees his face and her world explodes all over again.
Josh’s reappearance will force Kat to dive back into the mystery surrounding her father Clint’s murder and uncover long-buried secrets from her past.
Rosalind Eleazar (Slow Horses) takes the lead in the five-part series as Kat, with Ashley Walters (Top Boy) as Josh and Lenny Henry (Three Little Birds) as Clint. The cast also includes Jessica Plummer, Richard Armitage, Steve Pemberton, Marc Warren, Samantha Spiro, Lisa Faulkner, Mary Malone, James Nesbitt, Matt Jay-Willis, Oscar Kennedy and Charlie Hamblett.
Produced by Quay Street Productions, Missing You reunites the creative team behind the previous English-language Netflix-Coben dramas, including executive producers Coben, Nicola Shindler, Richard Fee and Danny Brocklehurst. But while Brocklehurst has been lead writer on those other series, here those duties were passed on to Asare-Archer, who had previously written two episodes of Stay Close and worked on shows such as Death in Paradise and Turn Up Charlie.
“I think my tone of voice is very similar to Harlan’s. I just got the Harlan world and really enjoyed the experience,” she tells DQ of working on Stay Close, which was released in 2021. “I loved working with the team and, from that, [Missing You] just happened to be one of the next books they were looking at. They’ve always got a set of books they’re exploring and that was one that just felt like a really good fit for me. So Nicola approached me with that book, asked me to read it, have a think, see if it fit – and it just fit really well with the kind of vibe and the sort of stories I want to explore.”
In particular, “I really love romance stories and really big, heightened, crazy emotions – and Missing You is very emotionally intense,” she explains. It’s just as dark and gritty as other Coben mysteries, “but it’s really emotional and joyful, and just full of a really interesting female character, in a way that is quite singular compared to a lot of his other books, which are really big, sprawling worlds with a lot of different characters and lots of different stories.
“This is really one woman and her tragedy in love and all that kind of stuff. That’s what really appealed to me. It’s a very female book, so it felt like a good fit.”
While the book, first published in 2014, is set in New York, where Kat is an NYPD detective, the series brings the story into the modern day and transplants the action from the Big Apple to England’s North West, with filming taking place around Manchester. Asare-Archer jokes that Coben was also ahead of his time when he conceived a thriller set around the world of online dating. The dating website used in the book has been upgraded to an app in the series, on which Kat first rediscovers Josh when they are ‘matched.’
As she tries to reestablish contact with him, Kat finds herself grappling with the loss of two important figures in her life – her fiancé and her father – while dealing with a pair of missing persons cases at work.
With Kat as the show’s central protagonist, all the action and revelations unfold from the viewpoint of a “really interesting, complicated, messy, joyful woman,” Asare-Archer says. “This is a character of really interesting contrasts. She’s a brilliant, proactive, exciting detective who’s great at her job, but also has a complicated personal life and a complicated personal history.”
That meant the writer had the chance to bring to the screen a woman who is allowed to be simultaneously brilliant, messy and really fun. “From the beginning, it was always clear [Coben] wanted a character who was going to be really warm and loving and kind, in a way we don’t always see,” Asare-Archer continues. “She just felt like a really rounded character because the whole series is really her point of view. We get to see very different shades of her home life, her professional life, her romantic life history. All these different types of Kats that we see evolving felt really interesting.”
Naturally, with Kat reckoning with so many events from her past, there are numerous flashbacks that help viewers come to understand the emotional predicaments she is facing.
“Flashbacks are part of the Harlan world,” Asare-Archer says. “Stay Close had an insane amount of flashbacks. It’s definitely part of the Harlan narrative. With this story, flashbacks were vital because they’re such an emotional part of a story. There was that sense that you had to have seen what Kat has lost in order to understand the rest of the story. And seeing the joy and the love between her and Josh and her father, both of whom are gone now, it felt integral to understanding why this woman is going to spend five episodes desperately trying to find answers to these things.
“You had to see who she was before and how she’s changed as well, and that loss of experience. In the book, she explains it. You get to hear someone’s version of why they’ve evolved and grown, and seeing those moments with Lenny and Ashley, they’re just so lovely. It’s dancing, it’s laughter, it’s parties and it’s joy, so they felt really important to the series.”
Coben’s novels are full of twists and cliff-hangers that inform much of the way the shows’ plots play out. But within that recognisable framework, Asare-Archer wanted Missing You to always feel as truthful as possible. “It’s a real fine art to be both grounded and completely heightened at the same time,” she observes, “and that definitely feels quite specific to his stories. They are big and unbelievable and perfectly believable in the same breath, and being able to do that is a bit of a fine art.”
The secret to finding and maintaining that balance, she continues, is emotion. “If you follow the emotion, you can take it anywhere. But you have to really make people believe in what these characters are going through. This is why in this one particularly, there are so many big emotions, there’s so much romantic love and friendship. There’s a lot of heart, warmth and kindness in the series, which gives you the space to go bigger on all those cliffs – and a lot of the cliff-hangers really do come from the characters and that sense of surprise of what’s happening to people that you love. But the key point is making sure we really give characters enough space [for viewers] to fall in love with them first.”
That the key creative team behind other Coben adaptations returned for Missing You meant Asare-Archer felt like she was stepping into a returning series, where everyone already knew the ambition for the series and how to achieve it. Yet Missing You also goes in new directions, both in front of and behind the camera.
“I was a brand new, different voice and it’s a very different type of book,” she says. “This is the first one that is going to be single POV. Taking one character through huge twists and turns is very different from taking lots of different characters.
“This is actually my third project working with Quay Street, so we all get each other really well. There’s a lot of trust in the team. There’s a sense we know what it’s meant to be, so it’s just giving it enough space to allow it to be something unique. Harlan is always very clear that every series should feel quite different and every series shouldn’t replicate what we’ve seen before, so it’s kind of taking the bits we know it needs but allowing it to really breathe and tell its own kind of story and really be true to my voice and Harlan’s voice as well.”
As a “creative director” on the show, Coben was always on hand to support Asare-Archer during the adaptation process, which meant keeping the best of the book while also finding ways to move away from and update the original story – in both time and place.
The book regularly features Kat’s inner voice, so a lot of the writer’s work was figuring out how to turn four pages of thoughts into a scene that relays that same sentiment but in a different way. “It’s always a very collaborative process,” she says. “It’s definitely not one where I go off and write by myself for two years and hand over a tombstone of scripts. It’s a really interactive process, which is great.”
As an executive producer, Asare-Archer was also involved in other creative decisions beyond the scripts, not least working with directors Nimer Rashed and Isher Sahota, production designer Vanessa Hawkins and costume designer Cobbie Yates.
“Usually as a writer, you hand over a script and then you get a CD X years later [of the finished show], and on this I was able to follow it through the whole way, talking to actors on the set and sitting in sound meetings and learning about different types of bird noises. But [Nicola Shindler] very much welcomes you in as much as you kind of need or want to be. Obviously, because I wrote all five episodes, it felt quite useful to me to be involved in everything.”
The biggest challenge Asare-Archer faced was finding the emotional truth in every moment of the series, particularly as the story focuses on a single character. That task also fell to star Eleazar, who had to make sure she could take Kat on those emotional journeys.
“She’s so thoughtful about her character, and she got her character from the first audition,” Asare-Archer says of the actor. “She really understood who she was and that sense of vulnerability, but also her strength and warmth. She’s not afraid for her characters to be as big as they are small and really have very different tones and shades. She’s incredible. She’s a delight to work with.”
It’s that singular viewpoint through the series that means the writer believes Missing You, which launched on January 1, stands apart from other Coben adaptations available on Netflix, as well as the fact it is much more romantic that previous series.
“This is the first one we say is a flat-out love story. Compared to all the others, this is a romance from the very beginning,” she says. “It’s a story about a couple and a woman’s love for her ex, a woman’s love for her father, and really how those relationships drive her. So it is definitely more romantic and, I would say, even joyful than possibly some of the others. There’s a lot more laughter, but then there is a lot more gritty darkness as well. I would say it’s a love story.”
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tagged in: Danny Brocklehurst, Harlan Coben, Missing You, Netflix, Nicola Shindler, Quay Street Productions, Richard Fee, Victoria Asare-Archer