The Stranger (Netflix)

Let’s talk about "The Stranger" on Netflix, which kind of snuck onto the platform in early 2020 and lured me in on a lazy winter weekend. This is a British miniseries adapted from the Harlan Coben novel, and at first glance it seems like your typical suburban mystery. An unknown woman appears from nowhere and drops a bombshell secret in someone’s lap, ripping apart cozy family dynamics. It’s not a revolutionary premise, but the show injects it with so much tension and “what would I do?” intrigue that I found myself glued to the screen in a way I honestly didn’t expect.

What immediately worked for me is the pacing. Traditionally, a lot of crime-mystery shows tend to stretch their plotlines to fill an episode quota, but "The Stranger" is tight — just 8 episodes, each with a proper cliffhanger. By episode two, you realize no one is safe (or honest) and the show is going to absolutely pile on the reveals. In lesser hands, this would feel convoluted, but here it mostly works. Each episode throws another wrench into the mix, whether it’s a surprising betrayal or a sudden body, and it keeps you anxious to find out what twisted bit of suburban drama you’ll witness next.

Richard Armitage leads the cast as Adam Price, the everyman whose life gets derailed. Armitage is one of those actors who can play haunted and shell-shocked really well, so his steady unraveling feels very real. Opposite him, Siobhan Finneran as Detective Johanna Griffin is a low-key scene stealer. She manages to imbue a fairly standard detective archetype with warmth and surprisingly funny deadpan moments, especially in her exchanges with her partner. The casting overall is clever; there’s a real sense of community and interconnection even when everyone’s busy backstabbing each other.

I have to give credit to the cinematography too. The color palette feels intentionally chilly — lots of muted blues and rain-slicked streets, which gives the whole thing a vaguely Menacing British Suburbs vibe. The mood never really lets up, which is both a strength and a slight weakness. It helps the tension, but at points it gets a little one-note. There were whole scenes where I wished they’d take a breather and let somebody crack a smile that wasn’t hiding a secret.

What didn’t quite work for me was, ironically, the density of the plot twists. For a while, it feels like every single character is hiding something, and not all the subplots really land. A teenage prank storyline (involving hallucinogenic drugs and an animal) felt way too soap opera for my taste and distracted from the genuinely interesting central mystery. Some of the late-season reveals are more silly than shocking, and I rolled my eyes more than once when the script clearly bent over backward to keep a surprise going.

Still, I think where "The Stranger" really excels is in the emotional fallout. The moments when characters are reeling from betrayals or forced to make life-altering decisions actually land. A particular sequence in a hospital room hits that raw nerve of realizing just how little you might actually know about the people closest to you. The show plays with that universal anxiety in a way that’s more unsettling than any of the actual crime.

The tone is consistent — dark, jittery, sometimes bleak but rarely exploitative, thankfully. The show resists making the violence too graphic or the twists too mean-spirited, and it’s not about shock value for its own sake. You can tell Harlan Coben’s fingerprint is strong: every “oh my god” revelation is counterbalanced by a reminder that these are real people, not just chess pieces in a puzzle box.

So is it perfect? Not really. I could have done with less busywork and more time spent exploring the characters’ actual motivations (a few supporting arcs kind of disappear), but it’s suspenseful and emotionally effective. It filled that "just one more episode" slot in my week. If you’re in the mood for a British suburban nightmare, it’s a solid pick that mostly avoids the genre’s lazier tricks. Disclaimer: you’ll probably sleep with one eye open.