# Stay Close (2021)

> A detective and a reporter untangle how one man's disappearance, echoing another seventeen years earlier, exposes the secrets of people connected to both.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/112588

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 8
- Episode runtime: 48 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama, mystery, crime
- Created by: Harlan Coben
- Network: Netflix
- Cast: Cush Jumbo, James Nesbitt, Richard Armitage, Sarah Parish, Daniel Francis, Bethany Antonia, Poppy Gilbert, Jo Joyner
- TMDB rating: 6.9/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2201227/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: brisk
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: tense, brooding, paranoid, melancholic, gripping

## What critics say

Audience reception is mixed, with viewers finding the twisty missing-persons mystery engaging but its plotting predictable and its characters thinly drawn.

## Synopsis

Stay Close (2021) is a British Netflix miniseries created by Harlan Coben. Across eight 48-minute episodes, the story follows Megan Pierce (Cush Jumbo) and DS Michael Broome (James Nesbitt) as a reporter and a detective whose paths converge when Carlton Flynn vanishes seventeen years to the night after Stewart Green did. Each strand of the investigation pulls at the lives of people tied to both men, including Ray Levine (Richard Armitage), Lorraine Griggs (Sarah Parish), and Erin Cartwright (Jo Joyner), whose private secrets begin to surface as the search continues. The engine of the show is a steady accumulation of small revelations: a missing husband, a celebrity's hidden history, and the question of what ordinary people will conceal to protect their reputations and families. The structure moves between past and present threads, with each episode peeling back another layer of the connections. The tone is tense and melancholic, with a brooding, paranoid atmosphere grounded in British suburban and urban life. Fans of Harlan Coben adaptations, The Missing and The Five will find resonance in its slow-building dread, interlocking secrets and emotionally weighted family drama.

## Shows like Stay Close

- [Deadwater Fell (2020)](https://ember.film/tv/80579)
- [Requiem (2018)](https://ember.film/tv/66496)
- [The Missing (2014)](https://ember.film/tv/54870)
- [The Guilty (2013)](https://ember.film/tv/51931)
- [Safe (2018)](https://ember.film/tv/63441)
- [Fool Me Once (2024)](https://ember.film/tv/140295)
- [The Suspect (2022)](https://ember.film/tv/119250)
- [The Jetty (2024)](https://ember.film/tv/150781)
- [The Five (2016)](https://ember.film/tv/58430)
- [Lazarus (2025)](https://ember.film/tv/161564)

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