'Missing You' Is Netflix's New Year's Day 2025 Debut

People underestimated Netflix when it started making original programming because they mistook the streaming service for wanting to be HBO (or, at the time, AMC or FX). However, from the beginning, Netflix's goal was to replace TV. Not just TV in the U.S., but in every country; global domination by single entertainment provider. It aimed at all the American TV markers first: PBS costume dramas, Bravo Reality fare, Network dating shows, and Lifetime Christmas Movies. Recently, the service has focused on TV traditions of other countries, including competing in the U.K.'s "New Year's Day Debut Derby," and for 2025, it's bringing the big guns with Harlan Coben's Missing You.

As the BBC's complete domination of the U.K. airwaves finally began to end in the late 1990s, it began competing with the new upstarts like Channels 4, 5, and ITV by leaning in the long-running favorites in its arsenal and populating the winter holidays with one-off Christmas specials that would bring viewers in faithfully every year. Nowadays, it's standard practice for every U.K. channel to competitively program Christmas Week and New Year's Day, with the first of January hosting the debuts of recent shows like Mr Bates vs the Post Office, The Serpent, the return of Happy Valley, Call the Midwife, both seasons of The Tourist, and Planet Earth III.

Netflix started horning in on this a couple of years ago, when it accidentally debuted another Coben film, Stay Close, on New Year's Eve 2022, only to see it blow up as THE show to watch the next morning as 2023 dawned. For New Year's Day 2024, Netflix tested another Coben film in the slot, Fool Me Once, this time, dropping it on the day, and got even more viewers (though it lost out to Mr. Bates in the final totals). Missing You will technically be the second film in a row to debut on New Year's in the U.K., but it's looking to be Netflix's third New Year's hit overall.