Sam Worthington in Netflix Mystery Series

Netflix‘s I Will Find You is the very model of a modern distracted-viewing show. Back in January, promoting The Rip, Matt Damon told a podcast host that Netflix was accounting for multi-tasking, multi-screen viewership by asking creators to “reiterate the plot three or four times in the dialogue.” It became the subject of a joke at the Oscars and was, briefly, enough a part of the discourse that Dan Lin, Netflix’s film chairman, had to deny the accusation at a company press event, saying “no such principle” existed. “I mean, if you watch our movies or TV shows, we don’t repeat our plots,” he said.

Because Lin is the chief of Netflix’s film operations, I assume he has not watched I Will Find You, the latest limited series adaptation from absurdly prolific hit-monger Harlan Coben. There is no plot point that isn’t repeated at least a half-dozen times and I put a heavy emphasis on “at least.” 

Because of the book/series’ mystery structure — featuring stretches in which as many as four different subsets of characters seek the same information and thus follow the same breadcrumbs while announcing their progress simultaneously — I honestly don’t think the avalanche of exposition was even the result of executive notes. I’m equally confident, though, that the series’ creative team never received a Netflix note saying, “Guys, you’re fitting two hours of plot into eight hours of programming, is there any other way we might use this time better?”

I Will Find You is a disposable mixture of repetition, red herrings, narrative dead-ends and illogical resolutions, but in part thanks to a top-notch cast led by Sam Worthington, Britt Lower, Chi McBride and Logan Browning, even the rampant wheel-spinning remains generally watchable, amid the irritation.

Adapted by Robert Hull (Gotham), I Will Find You stars Worthington as David Burroughs, a father serving a life sentence for the brutal murder of his young son, a crime he vehemently denies committing. Nobody seems to believe him, including his ex-wife (Erin Richards’ Cheryl) and his father (Hugh Thompson’s Lenny, formerly a Boston cop).

We see in flashbacks that the prosecution claimed David committed the crime in the throes of chronic night terrors, a bizarrely introduced character detail that apparently played no role in his sentencing and then IS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN IN THE SERIES.

Is the unremembered and involuntary nature of the alleged crime supposed to reassure viewers, just in case he might actually be guilty? Dunno. It’s also mentioned early-on that David was apparently a law professor at Boston University, another fact that IS NEVER MENTIONED AGAIN. I Will Find You is chock-full of fleeting pieces of information that are tossed out with no consideration for what they might actually mean to the story. Chekhov would not approve.

Anyway, David has been in a Maine prison for five years, refusing to have visitors — until his ex-wife’s sister Rachel (Britt Lower), a former reporter with the Boston Globe, comes to see him. Rachel, who lost her job under circumstances that seem like they should matter but truly do not, has a friend who posted social media pictures from Six Flags. In the background, one of the pictures features a young boy who is roughly the same age as David’s son would have been. He looks exactly like David’s son probably would look, right down to a very distinctive birthmark on his face.

This is a large coincidence. A very large coincidence. A ridiculous coincidence. Somehow, it ends up being only one of the three or four biggest coincidences driving I Will Find You.

David sees the picture and becomes convinced his son is still alive, even if DNA tests on the body found in his house — the murder was very, very brutal and required DNA identification — confirmed that it was his son. Soon, he’s breaking out of prison, with the help of the friendly warden (Peter Outerbridge), who served in the BPD with Lenny, and the warden’s son Adam (Jonathan Tucker), David’s best friend and another Boston cop. 

Once David is on the run, seeking the truth, this inevitably attracts the attention of the FBI’s Fugitive Task Force, a team led by Bureau legend Max Williams (McBride) — another character says they studied Max in Quantico, though nothing we learn about him supports his worthiness of study — and up-and-coming agent Sarah Greer (Browning). Two other members of the task force are involved at the beginning of the series, one of whom just stops being mentioned halfway through, like the actor suddenly got a better job, while the other starts off relevant to the team and becomes an occasional errand boy. This too is odd.

It isn’t even like the episodes of I Will Find You were too long, so anything semi-superfluous was cut. Most of the second-half installments come in under 40 minutes. Add some meat to these bones!

Soon, David and Rachel are teaming up to get to the truth, going from Maine to New York City to Boston. In the process, they get assistance from Rachel’s wealthy ex, Hayden (Milo Ventimiglia), still very much in love with her, and they all begin to suspect a Boston crime boss (Clancy Brown‘s Nicky Fisher) might be involved.

Off to the side, but clearly relevant, is the enigmatic Gertrude Payne (Madeleine Stowe), matriarch of a philanthropic-but-shady family that kinda resembles the Sacklers, though having a Sackler stand-in with the last name “Payne” might be too obvious. There’s also something happening in Switzerland. Why Switzerland? Shrug.

So at some point, David and Rachel are following a clue, the FBI team is following the same clue, the warden and David’s dad use their police connections to follow a tangential clue and everybody is repeating the same names and information that led to their respective investigation as if it’s all new information. 

It’s here that I would like to revisit Dan Lin’s comment about how if you watch Netflix’s movies or TV shows, they don’t repeat their plots, because yes they do, yes they do, yes they do. Sometimes, yes they do. 

For all the repetition, the ending of I Will Find You, which was not exactly what I expected it to be at any of the various points I made predictions in my notes, only makes sense if you don’t ask some very important questions. I, unfortunately, am paid to ask questions both very important and very minor. I can’t or won’t spoil those plot holes here so I’ll leave it at: The series’ conclusion is generally fine, in the sense that it’s very resolved, but it fails all logic tests.

In addition to the layers of overlapping exposition generating three to four separate plots of mini-momentum — in lieu of overall momentum — this trifurcated structure turns I Will Find You into a minimum of three different shows, each with different performance styles. 

The most important from that group of almost standalone shows is the one featuring Worthington, Lower and Ventimiglia. Worthington has a dogged earnestness that plays well, but going back to that “BU Law Professor” thing, it’s strange how little personality or backstory has been written for the character, who sounds like he’s convincingly from Southie, assuming Southie is a suburb of Perth.

I liked how intensely kind Ventimiglia makes Hayden and appreciated that Lower sneaks in traces of intentional humor, which makes it easier to deal with the unintentionally laughable nature of the series’ journalistic subplot. Or maybe I’m just assuming that the real-world Boston Globe doesn’t often run knowingly fake news stories on the assurance of disgraced former reporters, while this fictional Boston Globe sure does!

The best of that group of almost standalone shows is the bickering law enforcement procedural featuring Browning and McBride, who quickly establish a familiar but likable rapport and one could easily imagine Max and Sarah as the focus of a Criminal Minds-type broadcast series. Maybe in that series, those marginalized secondary agents would get to be characters. 

The most Canadian of that group of almost standalone shows is the one with Thompson and Outerbridge, two very fine and very non-Bostonian actors whose presence here is a reminder that I Will Find You was primarily shot in and around Toronto and feels like it — regardless of the number of establishing shots of Fenway Park accompanied by an onscreen “Boston” chyron. Tucker, who has actual Boston bona fides, spends a lot of time adding authenticity to this plot thread.

Faulty accents aside, the ensemble is really solid and, along with capable polish courtesy of directors including Brad Anderson and Maja Vrvilo, goes a long way toward making I Will Find You feel like less of a rush job than some of the string of Coben adaptations that have flooded Netflix and Amazon in recent years. 

Or maybe it doesn’t feel like a rush job because the show is in so little hurry to get anywhere. The brand and stars are sure to attract eyeballs, but I Will Find You is a show that ultimately is designed to be half-watched while keeping track of the World Cup, busy news headlines and other external stimuli.