Run Away Review – James Nesbitt and Minnie Driver bring us comfort TV at its best | TV and radio

THey, come sooner every time, right? I think we now get a new Harlan Coben release every three weeks or so. Who knows what rate will be achieved next year? We’re watching and waiting, but it probably won’t last long either way.

We’re now about a dozen offers banking on ratings on the best-selling thriller author’s multi-book deals with Netflix and Amazon. Overall it’s solid fare and the versatility no doubt helps finance many passion projects and pays off several mortgages along the way. It’s comforting television not just for the viewers, but I think for everyone involved.

Run Away (written by frequent Coben collaborator Danny Brocklehurst, as well as Tom Farrelly and Amanda Duke, and based on the 2019 book of the same name, and one of Coben’s least exciting and most harrowing films) is a return to form. Not least because it stars James Nesbitt as Simon, Paige’s tormented father, who is now suffering from drug addiction and away from home. It’s not a groundbreaking role for Nesbitt but it reminds you that few do the tortured Everyman better than he does. Also a huge delight is the always wonderful Tracey Ann Oberman as his intimidating lawyer Jessica, as well as Ruth Jones as private investigator Elena Ravenscroft, an iron fist in a velvet glove – subtly disturbing but lovely in every scene.

The plot moves in increasingly complex but well-oiled grooves toward its resolution over the course of eight episodes. Despite the concerns of his wife, Ingrid (Minnie Driver, soon to be comatose in an ICU bed while the hospital dialogue is so banal it could lead to shame, the victim looms above her), who worries that the official advice is that they must let their daughter Paige hit rock bottom before she can be helped, Simon is still secretly searching for his missing daughter.

He receives a tip-off that she is working in a local park, but just as he approaches her, he is confronted by her friend/dealer Aaron (an immediately admirably obnoxious character, played by Thomas Flynn) and she – see title – runs away. Aaron and Simon fight while Simon tries to give chase, and an edited clip quickly goes viral showing the latter brutally beating a homeless man. Which, when it is discovered that Aaron was stabbed to death shortly afterwards, frames Simon for his murder. Things get more complicated when he and Ingrid infiltrate the crime scene, meet the kindly Cornelius (Lucian Msamati), who has been keeping tabs on Paige and offering her occasional shelter when Aaron beats her, and they get involved in a shootout in the basement when he takes them to meet Aaron’s supplier who may know more about their daughter’s fate.

Meanwhile – because there is always a time frame, and usually two – Elena is hired by a very wealthy man named Sebastian Thorpe to search for his missing adopted son Henry, whose disappearance the police refuse to take seriously. “Adoption” is Chekhov’s weapon of the word in these circumstances, but Elena unfortunately doesn’t know she’s participating in a quarterly mystery series on Netflix and so doesn’t pick up on it right away. She may be distracted by her unexplained surveillance of a vegetarian restaurant owner.

Second: Meanwhile, a young murderous duo is out and about, well, killing people. It’s obviously not connected, but it’s clearly on instructions from a third party that needs it out of the way. “Make it different,” the girl (Maeve Courtier-Lili) reminds the boy as he leaves the car to execute his latest prey.

Each episode ends with a twist and at least a few new ways to pique viewers’ curiosity to head towards the next installment. The end of Part 1, for example, shows us Paige’s brother at college with the guitar we saw her using at work hidden in his room, and Elena discovering that the last post on Henry’s Instagram before he went on a two-week vacation was from Paige. Dum dum dah! Tune in next week, as they used to say before digital streaming liberated us from time and space. And we’ll do it for Coben. We do. Classification of all bankers.