Fool Me Once

I watched this whole thing so you don’t have to. There are some excellent performances, particularly Adeel Aktar as the rumpled police detective and Joanna Lumley at her plumiest as the wealthy mother-in-law. The problem was that there was just TOO MUCH. Entire side stories should have been dropped, sometimes things seemed out of order, and irritatingly, pretty much every lead character had a bad case of “I’m going to go off and investigate this on my own even though I don’t have authority, I could really bollux this up, and I’m not going to tell anyone what I know or where I’m going.” The show starts with a funeral – we meet Maya, the grieving widow, and her wealthy mother-in-law. Maya’s husband was killed in a robbery gone wrong. Maya’s sister was killed a few months previously, also in a robbery gone wrong. Maya is shocked the next day when she reviews her nanny-cam and sees her dead husband with her daughter and she sets out to investigate on her own. What could have been a taut whodunnit devolves into a million subplots with too many characters with too many coincidental connections to one another. The most interesting main characters tend to get drowned out in the sea of “who is this again?” A study in how not to adapt a novel for the screen.