Quickly introduced are hard-bitten Detective Broome (Nesbitt) and his partner Cartwright (Jo Joyner), an ex-couple now investigating a string of missing men cases, Green’s included. Seventeen years later, Cassie is living as Megan, a mother of three children engaged to be married to Dave (Daniel Francis), a burly chap with a secret of his own Ray is a mess, slumming as paparazzi for hire and Lorraine has cancer, with only a few years to live. It’s an unfortunate oversight, one that weighs on any comprehension of the series’ stakes.Ĭassie’s exit plan is hasty, meaning she ghosts everyone she knows, including love of her life Ray, and Lorraine (Sarah Parish), a co-worker and confidant. Once the victim of Green’s violence, traumatized, she skipped town although, because the Blackpool-set series’ geography isn’t adequately defined, it’s unclear whether she simply changed her name and moved a few streets over, or to another borough, jurisdiction, city, or even country. “He’s back,” the series repeatedly informs us, and he’s looking for Cassie.

Spoken of but never seen or heard throughout, Green may as well be “The One Who Shall Not Be Named,” whose spirit looms large. Where to Watch This Week’s New Movies, from ‘The Little Mermaid’ to ‘You Hurt My Feelings’īut is Green really dead? And if he is, did Cassie (or Ray) kill him? Answer to questions that haunt almost every episode come eventually. Green ends up mysteriously dead, and Cassie vanishes. The history summarized: once a popular dancer, one of Cassie’s customers (Stewart Green, played by Rod Hunt) became dangerously obsessed with her, an obsession that went to extremes when she began dating an ambitious photographer named Ray (Richard Armitage).

In “Stay Close,” Jumbo stars as Megan, a suburban mother of three whose previous life as a stripper named Cassie, along with the lives of those she thought she’d left in the past, come back to haunt her, threatening to ruin the perfect present-day reality she’s created for herself. So how does one reframe it in a way that feels at once fresh while also familiar, so as not to alienate increasingly impatient audiences? Therein lies the challenge for any new entries into the space, and one that Netflix’s latest Harlan Coben collaboration, “ Stay Close,” ultimately fails, despite a decorated cast led by Cush Jumbo and James Nesbitt, even if their performances are the best thing about the series. Rooted in noir tradition, the suspense thriller of the “your past is catching up with you” variety is well-worn.

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