Run Away

The Gravity of Falling Apart

Harlan Coben shows on Netflix tend to land with the same steady pulse: slick surfaces, wild turns, too many people carrying ugly secrets. *Run Away*, the eight-episode mystery that arrived on New Year's Day 2026, is built from that same kit. What caught me off guard is the sadness running through it. Beneath all the chasing and scheming, this is really about the slow, miserable helplessness of watching someone you love come undone.



James Nesbitt plays Simon Greene, a well-off financier whose life caves in when his eldest daughter Paige (Ellie de Lange) disappears into heroin addiction. Last year he was all sharp teeth and swagger as the crime boss in Coben's *Missing You*; here he does the opposite. He seems physically diminished. His shoulders sink. His face looks worn raw by sleeplessness. When he finally finds Paige in a public park, busking for drug money, he doesn't charge in like some savior. He freezes. His whole body seems to register, all at once, that the bruised, strung-out girl on the bench is his daughter. What follows with her dealer boyfriend is ugly, embarrassing, and small in the worst way, ending in a viral video that drags Simon's private pain into public view.

The trouble is that Nesbitt is carrying a heavier, sadder show than the plot around him seems interested in making. *Run Away* keeps wavering between intimate family drama and full-bore conspiracy pulp, then tries to do both at once. So alongside Simon's grief, we get a pair of blank-eyed assassins (Jon Pointing and Maeve Courtier-Lilley) killing for a cult called "The Shining Truth." We get Alfred Enoch trying hard to lend gravity to a detective role mostly limited to looking handsome and furrowing his brow. Lucy Mangan at The Guardian called it "comfort TV at its finest," and said that "few do the tormented Everyman better than he [Nesbitt] does." I think that's dead on about Nesbitt. The cult material, though, is another matter. Depending on your appetite for melodrama, it either adds flavor or just clutters the room. I never fully bought it.



The supporting cast is all over the place, and a lot of that comes down to how the series uses them. Minnie Driver, as Simon's wife Ingrid, is almost painfully wasted. After an early tragedy, she spends most of the show unconscious in a hospital bed, which feels bizarre when you have an actor with her sharp, difficult intelligence sitting right there. She could have anchored the later nonsense. Ruth Jones, on the other hand, walks off with every scene as Elena Ravenscroft, an offbeat private investigator with actual presence. Jones moves with a slow, deliberate heaviness as she picks apart a second missing-person case that eventually crashes into Simon's. She feels imported from a better and quieter series, and every time the camera cut back to her, I was relieved.



I've seen this move before from the Coben conveyor belt: enough cliffhangers to keep you from staring too hard at the gaps in the walls. As RogerEbert.com noted, the whole thing eventually turns into a "ludicrous assemblage of coincidences." That's fair. Still, even with all the clutter, one image sticks. Take away the cult, the assassins, the extra machinery, and what remains is a father moving through the dark, calling his daughter's name and dreading the answer. The show is messy and uneven across its eight hours, but when it stops long enough to let Nesbitt play a brokenhearted father, it gets at something painfully real.