Twenty-four million people watched I Will Find You, the eight-episode thriller which premiered on June 18, 2026, in its first four days on Netflix. To understand just how big that number is, it’s basically like the entire population of Australia hitting play in less than a week.
The new series starring Sam Worthington is based on Harlan Coben’s 2023 novel immediately shot to the top of Netflix’s global charts, landing in the Top 10 in 92 countries and claiming the number-one spot in 60 of them, including the United States.
According to Netflix’s internal data, the series has already gained 131.7 million hours of watch time in its debut week. The previous record for a Netflix series premiere in 2026 belonged to His & Hers with 19.9 million views in January. I Will Find You cleared that number with more views, in less time.
If you want to understand what a big deal that is, Bridgerton, one of Netflix’s biggest shows, only pulled 39.7 million views for Season 4 in its premiere week, and Stranger Things only drew 31.3 million for its series finale. I Will Find You sits fifth on that 2026 list.
Sam Worthington plays David Burroughs, a former lawyer serving a life sentence for the murder of his three-year-old son, Matthew. He’s spent five years in prison, maintaining his innocence while consumed by grief. Then his ex-sister-in-law Rachel, played by Britt Lower, shows up with a photograph of a child who shares Matthew’s birthmark. Then David breaks out of prison.
Coben told Netflix the story was always about something bigger than a missing child: “I wanted to figure out a way to tell a story that also had light, also had hope, and also had optimism.” He’s been doing this with Netflix since 2018, and I Will Find You is the 13th series adaptation of his novels on the platform. This one, though, marks the first Coben Netflix adaptation set in the United States, which is an odd thing to have taken this long, given the author is from New Jersey.
The showrunner, Robert Hull, has credits on Quantum Leap and Alcatraz, and he told Coben he wanted this particular story before the book even existed. “We went into Netflix, and Netflix is kind of like, ‘Oh, so you have a book?’ I’m like, ‘Not yet, but it will be,'” Coben recalled. Hull developed the series while Coben was still writing the novel. Brad Anderson directed the first two episodes.
Worthington is the clear anchor here. His career is one of Hollywood’s stranger trajectories. He started off as a bricklayer in Sydney before earning a scholarship to the National Institute of Dramatic Art. He then won Australia’s AFI Award for Best Actor for his work in the 2004 drama Somersault. Not long after, he found himself living out of a red Toyota hatchback. A year or two later, James Cameron cast him as Jake Sully in Avatar (2009) – the highest-grossing movie of all time. That’s quite a jump.
What came after that was, by Worthington’s own admission, a miscalculation. “The movies that I did right after Avatar were great big spectacles, but I should have been looking for movies that pried a little bit more into the human condition,” he told Variety in 2022. He has been course-correcting ever since, taking parts in Hacksaw Ridge, Under the Banner of Heaven, and Horizon: An American Saga. But I Will Find You might turn out to be his most famous work after Avatar.
The rest of the cast includes Milo Ventimiglia, Chi McBride, Logan Browning, Erin Richards, Jonathan Tucker, Nick Offerman, Lukas Gage, and Harry Shum Jr. Coben called it “a dream cast all the way through.”
Critics have been fairly divided about the show, however. It currently sits at 65% on Rotten Tomatoes — with some calling it relentlessly paced and others pointing at the genre trappings. But audiences don’t seem to care about all that. They’re showing up to binge it.
All eight episodes of I Will Find You are streaming on Netflix right now.
