Stay close (2021) - Ankündigung und Allgemeines

Sweet

Herr im Himmel

Fetziger Typ!

Fetziger Typ!

Wen von beiden meinst Du denn? Nein, ich frage

Fetziger Typ!

Wen von beiden meinst Du denn? Nein, ich frage

Das ist eine sehr gute Frage

Na, wer wohl?
Ihr habt ja recht, Hirn war für einen Moment ausgeschaltet.

Na, wer wohl?
Ihr habt ja recht, Hirn war für einen Moment ausgeschaltet.

Es sei dir verziehen Ach quatsch, mein Hirn befindet sich hier im Board immer auf Stand by

Eine Einschätzung der literarischen Qualitäten Harlan Cobens, der ich mich 100%ig anschließen kann, liefert "Den of Geek" mit dieser Ankündigung für "Stay close":

The Undemanding Joys of a Harlan Coben Thriller
The latest Harlan Coben adaptation, Stay Close, arrives on Netflix on New Year’s Eve. Here’s why they make the perfect lazy binge.

By Louisa Mellor
December 8, 2021


|It’s no accident that Harlan Coben’s Stay Close lands on Netflix on the 31st of December. That’s a precision release strategy calibrated to hit the exact spot between viewers’ reduced mental capacity and increased desire to gaze upon luxurious marble kitchen islands on the last day of the year. A Harlan Coben thriller is succour to a weakened state. With their gentle, leafy suburbs and upper middle-class homes – every soft-close cabinet of which is squirming with secrets – they make a binge-watch par excellence. Nothing nails you to your sofa quite like a ludicrously unlikely drama about people with big houses and dark pasts.

From Safe to The Five, The Stranger, and soon, Stay Close, here’s what makes the English-language Harlan Coben adaptations addictive yet undemanding viewing.

They’re all essentially the same
20 years ago: a Thing! Today: that Thing has returned to haunt someone living in a well-appointed six-bed with double garage and curb appeal. Over the course of eight-10 episodes, a long-buried secret will worm its way to the surface, threatening to leave muddy footprints all over the protagonist’s Land Rover Discovery and De’Longhi coffee machine. Will they ultimately end up the better for the Thing coming out? Probably, yes. But will life ever be the same again? It will not.

The secrets!
Secrets are the perennial theme of a Harlan Coben thriller, which all take the stance that we can never really know anybody. That nice lady in the PTA? Once ran a brothel. Your kids’ badminton coach? Did a hit-and-run aged 18. The helpful receptionist at the gym? She’s actually your daughter. Pick up and shake any character and they’ll rattle with at least one secret that will work its way out by the end.

The plots are essentially updated versions of 19th century novels about well-to-do women hiding scandalous pasts and mayors who once drunkenly gambled away their wife and kids. Everybody is connected to everybody else through a sticky web of past events. And once you’ve got the hang of the lurid tone, there’s a relaxing predictability about it all, not dissimilar to watching a cooking show. Here are the many characters, all measured out in neat little bowls, now tip them into the pot, stir, heat and voila! Simmering secret stew.

The twists!
Some thrillers are content with just one big twist, delivered right at the end. Not the Harlan Coben genus. The sheer density of secrets per character results in an average of three to five twists per episode, including a cliff-hanger. Once things really get going, not ten minutes will go by without somebody shouting “You’re my dad!” or “I left you for dead!” Value for money.

The unexpectedly and delightfully bonkers bits
It’s not all lacrosse team barbecues and corpses in the boot of company SUVs. Every so often in the translation between these novels’ US origins and the UK adaptation by Danny Brocklehurst and team, arrives a pleasingly bonkers element. The Stranger featured a beheaded alpaca named after a member of Take That, and Stay Close has a pair of weirdo villains named Ken and Barbie who feel as though they’ve drifted in from another show entirely. And speaking of surprises…

Unexpected comedy highlights
You may not expect to find actual Jennifer Saunders or actual Eddie Izzard among the casts of a UK TV crime thriller, but find them you will, and a delight they are too. Saunders plays cafe owner Heidi in The Stranger, and Izzard (whose drama back catalogue is pretty extensive by now) plays a high-functioning addict and pro-bono lawyer in Stay Close. Both are great, as tend to be the female police officers in these series. Siobhan Finneran, Amanda Abbington, Jo Joyner all play no-nonsense coppers that, dark secrets notwithstanding, you’d happily invite on a mates’ night out.

The houses
If anything will teach you that money and a massive house won’t buy you happiness, it’s a Harlan Coben thriller. That said, the massive houses in leafy expensive suburbs where women answer the door in luxe workout gear saying things like “Sorry for the outfit, I’m doing boxercise” are relaxing to look at in the extreme. See-through kettles, over-sized arty glass bowls, Italian marble kitchens and bi-fold doors leading onto sunny terraces… it’s like flicking through a copy of Homes & Gardens in the dentist’s waiting room: drama and pain are on their way, but first enjoy this tasteful patio set.

Answers are guaranteed
The three states of watching a Harlan Coben thriller are: confused, suspicious, or asleep. Viewers though, can rest assured that after devoting hours of baffled dozing suspicion to a series, there will be concrete answers. Tony-Soprano-in-the-diner ambiguity is not the game here. These thrillers are assiduous about providing an explanation for every little mystery, even if that does tend to turn the dialogue into a shopping list by the end.
The same dogged approach is taken to character. Everybody can be explained in their entirety by up to three defining incidents from their past, including but not limited to: murder, accidental murder, murders they thought they committed but it turns out they didn’t, and murders they did commit and are now currently investigating in their job as a police detective. It all runs along nicely uncomplicated lines: guilt either makes people turn bad (they run a bar) or turn good (they volunteer for a charity). No, none of it quite plumbs the depths of human experience, but there’s something satisfying about the black and whiteness of it all.

Harlan Coben’s Stay Close comes to Netflix on December 31st.

Werbung an prominenter Stelle am Times Square in NYC - Harlan Coben freut sich:
https://twitter.com/HarlanCoben/status/ ... GZ2SA&s=19

Harlan Coben über "Stay close" und das, was danach kommen mag:
https://deadline.com/2021/12/harlan-cob ... 234901084/

Stay Close’ Creator Harlan Coben: “The Worst Adaptations Are Slavishly Devoted To The Original Text”; Novellist Talks Post-Netflix Plans
By Max Goldbart

December 27, 2021 12:01am


“The worst TV adaptations are slavishly devoted to the [original] text,” according to The Stranger creator Harlan Coben, who said he “hopes to continue” working with Netflix as his five-year deal draws to a close.

Coben was speaking in a Q&A for his latest Netflix project, Red Production Company’s Stay Close starring Cush Jumbo, Richard Armitage and James Nesbitt, which is set to drop on December 31.

The U.S. novellist-turned-screenwriter’s unique five-year deal with the streamer sees him mostly adapt his own novels for shows around Europe and he explained he had no issue with relocating Stay Close from Atlantic City to the British seaside resort of Blackpool for the TV version.
It’s really fun to change things around,” said Coben. “The worst adaptations are the ones slavishly devoted to the [original] text. I like to work with the cast of characters to move a story along.”

Backing up his comments, Hobbit star Armitage credited Coben for “unpacking the book into a screenplay and tailoring it to the characters,” while Jumbo hailed the decision to move to Blackpool as the pandemic has strengthened viewers’ relationships with their communities.

“Our worlds have got a lot smaller in the pandemic,” she added, before the Good Wife star admitted many people in the U.S. probably haven’t realized she is English.

The show is similar in scope to The Stranger and features three people haunted by a disappearance 17 years before, which is reignited by another disappearance that takes place in the present. Eddie Izzard and Industry’s Sarah Parish also star.

Coben’s daughter joined the writers’ room and he credited her with improving the dialogue for the younger audience, having initially been brought on as writer for The Stranger by Red Production Company exec Nicola Shindler.

“She gets young people better than I do,” explained Coben. “It’s been such a cool experience being in a writing room with her, yelling and screaming at each other in a creative way.”

Questioned by Deadline on plans for when his Netflix deal runs down in 2023, Coben said he “hasn’t thought about what’s next” but “hopes we can continue what we’ve been doing.”

He has plans for at least two more shows, which would bring him up to nine of the planned 14 when the deal was struck in 2018.

“They’ve been great collaborators and give me freedom to work with others if I want to,” he added. “On December 31, I love the idea that someone in L.A. will push a button and 200M people in 190 countries will be able to watch my show.”

Lieben Dank Arianna

Werbung an prominenter Stelle am Times Square in NYC - Harlan Coben freut sich:
https://twitter.com/HarlanCoben/status/ ... GZ2SA&s=19

Richard, ähm Verzeihung Ray, in der Größe ist immer wieder schön. Da freue ich mich auch, Coben hin oder her.

Hammer (geil) oder?

Er kuckt uns ja auch an

Er kuckt uns ja auch an