For all the cutesiness of the name, nannycams are, when you think about it, really quite sinister bits of kit. The one around which Fool Me Once – the latest slick, big budget Brit thriller from Netflix – revolves most certainly is: ushering in a plot that quickly sprawls out from a stately home funeral to the military, the police, big pharma, hackers and the very topical issue of augmented/not-augmented reality.
Michelle Keegan is Maya Stern, a former army captain who stepped down from her post in disgrace after a pesky whistleblower exposed her doing some not-very-nice things to civilians. The funeral is that of her husband, Joe (Richard Armitage), whom she saw shot dead in front of her. Joanna Lumley, as you would expect, does a quite fabulous job as Maya’s mother-in-law-from-hell, who may or may not know something about the fact that Joe has popped up on his widow’s nannycam even though he’s supposed to be dead.
And so the story centres around trying to figure out who killed Joe... or if, in fact, he is actually still alive. On the case with this are the obligatory chalk-and-cheese detective duo, one of whom, of course, is a recovering alcoholic and the other who, of course, speaks almost entirely in annoying millennial-isms and drinks elaborate smoothies and so on. “He’s never heard of Duran Duran!” rages DS Sami Kierce (Adeel Akhtar) to his wife about Detective Marty McGreggor (Dino Fetscher).
It will not surprise you to learn that, eventually, they get on, and work quite well together… except Kierce, like everyone in these kind of shows, is not quite what he seems.
Really though, those two are a side act to the Michelle Keegan show. It's is Maya whose family life, PTSD, endless flashbacks to the night her husband got shot, arguments with her mother-in-law and general confused and chaotic energy that are the focus. Keegan is well cast as a lead character with whom it is difficult to entirely sympathise.
This is Netflix’s eighth – eighth! – adaptation of American author Harlan Coben's novels, and it has all the satisfying twists and turns one has come to expect from his work. The dialogue, though, is rather hammy: people talk in a mixture of over-exposition and clunky funnies like the Duran Duran one mentioned above, which goes on for quite a bit longer than it probably needs to. The ominous, BBC drama-esque synth music, too, also feels extraordinarily by numbers and gets pretty overbearing.
None of this really matters too much, however: and it would be a lie to say that this is anything other highly bingeable fare. I devoured all of its eight hours one after the other, just as the Netflix algorithm ordained that I would. I doubt I will be thinking or talking about it much come the end of January. But it pushes all the usual buttons to great effect and… well, look, let’s be honest: if you’re nursing a sore head on New Year’s Day when it drops, Fool Me Once will serve its purpose extremely well.
