Netflix's new number 1 series shouldn't surprise you – but it should probably tempt you
I Will Find You was designed for success
When Netflix first showed off a teaser trailer for its new smash-hit of a show, I Will Find You, I immediately had a good sense that it would do well. As I wrote at the time, Netflix has (along with some of the other best streaming services out there) figured out a pretty reliable formula to develop really solid shows that people want to watch.
That formula? Enlist best-selling thriller authors, and either adapt their existing work, or get them to pen new plots full of twists and turns. After all, there's no one quite like an etablished author to tell you how to make sure that a story keeps audiences gripped from start to finish.
In the case of I Will Find You, that author is Harlan Coben, who had already worked on a healthy grab bag of shows and movies for Netflix, and who is quietly but clearly one of its biggest assets right now. The show stars Sam Worthington, a longtime and very reliable star, but also Britt Lower, who shot to fame thanks to her big role in Severance on Apple TV.
Worthington plays a tortured father who finds himself in prison, convicted of the murder of his own son, but knowing full well that he never did any such thing. It's tearing him up inside, but everything starts to clarify when Lower's character visits him in jail.
She seems to have found proof that he didn't kill his son. It's not that she can show someone else committing the crime, but rather that she's found evidence that his son never died in the first place. If he's still out in the world, then it was actually a kidnapping, which changes everything.
I haven't watched the show yet, so I can't comment on its pacing or how that mystery unfolds, but it's clearly chiming with audiences, since it absolutely shot to the top of Netflix's in-house charts on release. Now, the streamer has confirmed that it's the biggest series launch of the year, having accumulated a massive 24 million views in just its first four days.
Those are numbers that even giants like HBO would probably dream of for the latest round of House of the Dragon, and it underlines the fact that when Netflix hits big, its scale is hard to match. The good news is that the show is out in its entirety, with no weekly schedule to stick to, so you can check it out now if this all has piqued your interest.
