Stay Close: the Netflix juggernaut could be TV’s next big thing

Intense, compressed storytelling crackling with twists and turns is at the heart of bingeworthy Netflix drama Stay Close.

Stay Close is Netflix’s latest big hit

Stay Close, currently one of Netflix’s most popular dramas by some distance, is from the original novel by the seemingly indefatigable crime writer Harlan Coben, who has sold around 75 million copies of his thrillers and has been translated into 43 languages.

He’s not only one of the world’s most successful authors but now a successful producer of the popular adaptations of his best-selling novels. Stay Close is the fourth collaboration for Coben and Nicola Shindler, Danny Brocklehurst and Richard Fee and the RED production company, following the success of 2016’s The Five with Sarah Solemani and Lee Ingleby, 2018’s Safe, which starred Michael C. Hall, and current smash-hit The Stranger, starring Richard Armitage and Jennifer Saunders, still drawing extraordinary numbers for Netflix.

Brocklehurst is lead writer again, continuing to add substantial credits to his TV resume. As is Irish director Daniel O’Hara, who has now directed television projects for a wide range of international broadcasters along with Netflix. And as usual, like any Coben adaptation, Stay Close has attracted a top cast in Cush Jumbo (Deadwater Fell), James Nesbitt (The Missing), and Richard Armitage once more, in the three lead roles, with splendid support from Sarah Parish (Doctor Who), who manages to steal the show as nightclub manager, Lorraine Griggs.

In keeping with previous Coben adaptations, Stay Close relocates the story from the US to UK shores, again drawing some controversy but of absolutely no concern to Coben, who in 2018 struck a multimillion dollar deal with Netflix to adapt 14 of his novels for the omnivorous streamer. The deal was unique from the start, designed to be aggressively international, with the English-language novels being adapted into a variety of foreign tongues through Netflix’s various production partners across Europe.

“They want to do a lot of international stuff and my books sell well overseas,” he said at the time. “I sell more internationally than I do in the USA. I thought it would be a cool opportunity, to do a Netflix Spain show, Netflix France show, Netflix UK show, Netflix US show. It was appealing to me.”

The notion that on one day, the series drops all eight episodes in 190 countries was also pleasing he said. “More than 200 million subscribers, how many people is that? All at one time. It’s a cool space to be in.” He likes to call the Netflix shows “hybrids” and despite their new cultural identities, “You can still feel the Americanism”. But he’s clear in interviews he cares little how much they are adapted and originalised, especially when he is overseeing them as executive producer.

He argues that the most boring adaptations are the ones that are slavishly devoted to the text. “The comparison that I use is songs. If I wrote a hit song called ‘The Innocent’ and somebody in Spain is remaking it, I don’t want them to sound exactly like me; that would be boring. I want them to bring in their culture, their background, their musical styles into it with my song. I think that makes it richer. That’s my personal philosophy.”

Coben likes to point out that before he was a writer he worked in the international travel business, a family job, his job to fly over to different countries and help set up trips. “I’ve always had a great affection for travel,” he says. “We are living in the golden age of television. Five years ago, no American would watch a foreign-language show. They just wouldn’t. There’s so much talent out there internationally now, the best stuff is really being done in pockets that haven’t had the US saturation yet. Americans are such Americentric people, but we’re learning.”

He calls his books “novels of immersion”, and certainly once you start reading it’s hard not to lose yourself completely in them. “I want it to be the book you take on a beach holiday to St Tropez but then you have to stay in your hotel room to finish it.” Coben started with the inimitable Myron Bolitar novels in the mid-1990s about a basketball player turned sports agent turned private eye who gets sucked into terrible, suspenseful situations. But he made his name with several stand-alone books whose trademark was the way he creates tension and suspense around ordinary people caught up in terrifying situations, usually concerning family: the dead turn out to be alive, unlikely good guys are really killers, people are often not who their loved ones believed them to be. They sold millions.

The joy of reading Coben comes from the nagging pleasure of trying to double guess how on earth he can resolve his disparate, seemingly unrelated storylines; few writers are so duplicitous possessed of such a self-conscious awareness of the artificiality of narration and the ambiguity of plots themselves.

And Stay Close is certainly a wonderful puzzle and the perfect show for bingeing as it follows the intertwining stories of three central characters all with pasts that suddenly catch up with them, filling them with dread, upending their lives. And of course affecting those close to them.

It starts with the death of a man in the woods behind a gaudy strip club called Vipers who turns out to be Carlton Flynn (Connor Calland), the missing son of the well-connected Del Flynn (Ross Boatman). James Nesbitt is the investigating detective who quickly realises the young bloke disappeared on April 17, a date eerily similar to that of the only case Broome couldn’t solve, the disappearance of someone named Stewart Green (Rod Hunt).

We’re quickly introduced to Cush Jumbo’s Megan Pierce, living a bucolic domestic life with her fiancé Dave Shaw (Daniel Francis) and their daughters Jordan (Dylan Francis), Laura (Tallulah Byrne) and Kayleigh (Bethany Antonia). But it quickly turns out she might once have been someone called Cassie in the past leading a very different life.

Then there’s a former war photographer called Ray (Richard Armitage), who just might have photos of what happened in the woods that night and might just have some former connection to this Cassie. All their lives might be connected through Parish’s feisty redheaded Lorraine who manages the club and who has some long-term connection to the mysterious and it seems violent Green.

Like most of Coben’s work this adaptation crackles with twists and turns, with surprises, reveals and clever misdirection. There’s almost a mathematical precision of design in the plotting and effortless drive in the storytelling (though the abruptness of the twists might infuriate some viewers).

A inexorable interior logic and a carefully measured tempo controls the series but Coben obviously cares about his characters and there’s a moral sympathy at work in the case of each one and the mood of desperation cast by murder makes them into human dramas and not merely technical diversions. “It’s one thing to have a fast-moving plot; I can stir your mind and your pulse,” he says. “But if I’m not also stirring your heart it’s not going to work.”

The concern in Stay Close is human relationships, people being in trouble.

As in so many of Coben’s novels the secret is buried in a family past and it’s obvious from the start that tangled histories will have to be revealed in order to save further lives being taken. Coben is brilliant at the chill of destiny in his work, its inexorability.

It starts like so many of Coben’s novels at the point of the discovery of a crime. But the question is not simply who did it but from where and from how long ago did this crime start, and why, just at this moment did it erupt? What are the connections that will lead us back to the source?

How many different strands will overlap and what are the network of connections that lead to this point? And like Coben’s novels themselves, his TV shows are like metaphors for stress – not only for his characters but for those of us watching them trying to cope as the past starts to strangle their futures.

It’s very well organised by McGrath, the performances competent and engaging, especially Ms Parish but it’s not really a series about direction or acting but about intense compressed storytelling, though the gyrating plot meshes satisfactorily with the larger-than-life impressions created by the characters and their crises.

Stay Closeis streaming on Netflix.