TV shows we love: Run Away
An everyday banker, with a beautiful family and a beautiful home, gets his life turned completely upside down when his drug-addicted daughter Paige goes missing. I didn’t need much more to start watching Run Away as I have loved several of Harlan Coben’s other TV shows – all suspenseful and exciting.
Run Away was no different. It is a short eight-episode series starring James Nesbitt as Simon Greene, the father who seems to be the only one desperately looking for his daughter. His wife, Ingrid, is played by Minnie Driver, an actress I enjoy watching and could have benefited from some more appearances in this show.
Simon goes on a mad hunt trying to find his daughter, hires a private investigator Elena Ravenscroft, my favourite character on the show with her own back story, gets into trouble with drug lords and discovers secret societies. In the search for his daughter, he discovers he doesn’t know her all that well. Or at least as well as he thought. Do we ever know our loved ones well and what they are capable of?
An interesting footnote is Paige’s sister Anya, who appears in a wheelchair for most of the show, except for one scene where she is seen walking. Without building further on this character, we next see her in her chair again. This was confusing and I thought it was a poorly-done scenario at first. But it was deliberate and done to portray the real-life condition of Ellie Henry who plays Anya. Ellie has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome so she is an ambulatory wheelchair user. She can walk but often uses a wheelchair due to pain, joint instability or fatigue. The lack of expansion on this story received a lot of criticism when it first came out yet the actress and the team were pleased with its portrayal. I felt a little bewildered at first.
As the Greene family looks for Paige, different stories with other characters unfold and the viewer is left constantly searching for the link between them. It all comes together in the end but in ways I definitely did not expect. This is what I like about Coben’s stories. They are not a simple whodunnit case, but usually a much more tangled look at complicated relationships and how the past lingers on for far too long.
His Run Away, published in 2019, is set in New York, yet the Netflix show was filmed across England, mainly in Greater Manchester. Either way, in posh gardens and beautiful parks, you never know what’s lurking in the shadows. Stories of troubled childhoods and quirky, dark young couples, cults and what someone is willing to do for family all come bursting on screen. It’s addictive – you’ve been warned.