Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once Builds a Clever Trap, Then Springs It Too Early

Fool Me Once Review: A Strong Hook, a Spent Premise, and a 5.5/10

Netflix opened 2024 with a dead husband who will not stay dead. Fool Me Once, adapted by Danny Brocklehurst from Harlan Coben’s 2016 novel, put all eight of its episodes on the service on 1 January 2024. Michelle Keegan plays Maya Stern, a former military pilot struggling with the murder of her husband, Joe Burkett. Then she installs a nanny cam to watch her young daughter, and Joe — believed to be dead — turns up in the footage.

Trailer, via Netflix.

Maya Stern, the nanny cam and the husband in the frame

That is the hook, and it is a good one. A camera set up to protect a child instead delivers a man the audience has already buried. Maya does not get to sit with the shock for long. The sight of Joe sends her into a conspiracy that reaches back to the death of her sister, Claire, and forward into the affairs of Joe’s wealthy family and its pharmaceutical company, Burkett Global.

The show is a British thriller, produced by Quay Street Productions for Netflix, and it carries the Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once title on the service. Coben’s name is the brand here. Brocklehurst is the one who turned the 2016 book into eight episodes, and Netflix gave the whole season a single drop date rather than a weekly run.

Keegan carries the middle of the series. Maya is a former pilot, which the show uses as shorthand for a woman who can handle herself, and the plot asks her to keep digging when every answer costs her something. Around her, the cast is deep. Adeel Akhtar plays Sami Kierce. Richard Armitage is Joe. Joanna Lumley is Judith Burkett, the family matriarch. Emmett J. Scanlan appears as Shane Tessier, Dino Fetscher as Marty McGreggor, Marcus Garvey as Eddie Walker. Hattie Morahan plays Caroline Burkett, with Danya Griver as Abby Walker, Daniel Burt as Daniel Walker and Thea Taylor-Morgan as Lily Burkett.

That is a lot of names for eight episodes, and it is the first sign of trouble.

Corey Rudzinski and the Burkett Global cover-up

The conspiracy has a paper trail. Maya’s investigation brings her to Corey Rudzinski, a whistleblower whose revelations about Burkett Global’s misconduct set off a deeper cover-up. This is where Fool Me Once wants to be more than a missing-body puzzle. A pharmaceutical company with a secret, a family with money and a whistleblower in the middle — the pieces are familiar, and the show treats them as familiar. That is this paper’s read on the material, not a label the source applies.

Maya’s path runs through betrayal, hidden motives and threats. The source synopsis describes shocking revelations about Joe’s past, about Maya’s own actions, and about the crimes buried inside the Burkett legacy. Those revelations get paid, in the sense that the plot delivers twists. Whether they are earned is another question.

The structure is the problem. Fool Me Once stacks mystery on mystery — Joe’s reappearance, Claire’s death, the company’s misconduct, the family’s secrets — and each new layer pushes the last one further from resolution. By the back half, the show is managing a queue of unanswered questions rather than building one.

The Burkett family and the weight of eight episodes

Lumley’s Judith Burkett is the matriarch of the family that owns Burkett Global, and the show leans on her for menace. Armitage’s Joe is the dead man at the center of everything, which means he exists mostly in flashback and in the minds of the people who knew him. Both are fine. Neither gets the room to be more than a piece of the machine.

Eight episodes is the right length for a story like this, and Fool Me Once still feels padded. The middle stretch repeats its own beats: Maya finds a thread, pulls it, gets warned off, finds another. The nanny cam that starts the whole thing is a device, not a theme. Once it has done its job, the show has to find somewhere else to put its tension, and it does not always find it.

The genre mix — drama, crime, mystery — is accurate. The show is not a horror story, despite the dead husband. It is a puzzle box with a corporate scandal inside it, and puzzle boxes live or die on whether the final turn justifies the fiddling.

What Fool Me Once gets right, and what it does not

Here is the case for the show. Keegan is a credible lead, and the premise is strong enough to pull a viewer through the first three episodes without effort. The Burkett family gives the conspiracy a face, and Burkett Global gives it a motive. Coben’s books have a following for a reason, and Brocklehurst knows how to end an episode on a turn.

Here is the case against. The revelations, when they come, are less interesting than the questions that produced them. The whistleblower thread and the family thread compete for time, and neither gets enough. The show is competent rather than gripping, which is the worst thing a thriller can be.

Ranking the elements that decide whether Fool Me Once works:

1. The nanny cam premise — the single best idea in the series, and the one it uses up fastest.
2. Michelle Keegan as Maya Stern — the reason to keep watching when the plot sags.
3. Joanna Lumley as Judith Burkett — the family menace the conspiracy needs.
4. Corey Rudzinski and the Burkett Global cover-up — the plot’s engine, and its most crowded lane.
5. The eight-episode structure — enough room for the story, not enough discipline to fill it.

The score

Fool Me Once premiered on Netflix on 1 January 2024. It ran one season of eight episodes, all released the same day. It is a British thriller from Quay Street Productions, adapted by Danny Brocklehurst from Harlan Coben’s 2016 novel. Keegan, Akhtar, Fetscher, Armitage and Lumley lead the cast.

Key facts

• Title: Fool Me Once (also known as Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once)
• Network: Netflix
• Premiere: 1 January 2024
• Episodes: 8, across 1 season
• Adapted by: Danny Brocklehurst, from Harlan Coben’s 2016 novel
• Producer: Quay Street Productions
• Genres: Drama, Crime, Mystery
• Lead cast: Michelle Keegan, Adeel Akhtar, Richard Armitage, Joanna Lumley, Dino Fetscher
• Metacritic: 55/100
• Score: 5.5/10

The 5.5 is the right number. Fool Me Once is not a bad show; it is a show that never becomes the one it could have been. The premise is the strongest thing about it, and this paper’s view is that the premise runs out of road well before the finale. What remains is a competent conspiracy drama with a good cast and too many threads, and competence is not what anyone came for.

The part worth watching is Keegan. She plays Maya as a woman who keeps moving because stopping means feeling it, and that is the only thing in the series that does not feel like a plot mechanism. Everything else — the whistleblower, the company, the family, the buried crimes — is furniture arranged around her.

Netflix has built a run of Coben adaptations, and Fool Me Once shows both why that run works and where it thins out. The hook is reliable. The follow-through is not. A viewer who wants a puzzle will get one. A viewer who wants the puzzle to mean something should look elsewhere.

Fool Me Once · Harlan Coben · Joanna Lumley · Michelle Keegan · Netflix thriller · TV Review