‘Fool Me Once’ Review: Boring Main Character, But Everyone Else is Aces

The best part of Fool Me Once is when it was over. Because that’s when I could look back and truly appreciate how this show actually fooled me. The trailer fooled me into thinking that this was all a ploy by the husband to fake his death. It also fooled me to think that Richard Armitage would spend more time on our screens. Spoiler: he didn’t. The first episode fooled me into thinking that Maya aka the wife was absolutely clueless about who killed her husband and sister. And all the episodes that followed fooled me by throwing nonsensical storyline after nonsensical storyline in my way, hoping that would keep me entertained long enough to watch. In a way it worked. I did watch the whole thing. But ultimately I did not keep watching this show for the story or the lead. I kept watching for the side characters or secondary characters.

Maya Stern, played by Michelle Keegan, was admittedly a badass in Fool Me Once. She didn’t take anyone’s shit even though she was facing the death of her husband and the mystery that surrounded it all. But that’s where it ended. Her character was one dimensional. She didn’t take people’s shit and that was it. I didn’t feel her connection with her daughter or her grief for her husband, with the latter making sense because *spoiler* she killed her husband. And Maya didn’t become interesting until the very final episode where she recounted how her husband killed her sister and she found out. That revelation made me so angry because that’s when Maya became interesting. And it makes me want to shake Fool Me Once as an entirety because they could have made an infinitely more interesting show about a wife trying to figure out in real time if her husband killed her sister.

Honestly, this show had some heavy topics, and somehow managed to not make me care for any of it.

I didn’t care about the medical trials and how the Burkett family was using their money to hide the problems with their medicine. I didn’t care about Maya and the flashbacks she was having to her time in war. I didn’t care for the whistleblower that destroyed Maya’s life after she killed civilians. I didn’t care about Maya’s sister’s children finding out they had a half brother. I didn’t even care about Maya’s sister having a past romance and some random guy popping up that did nothing for the story. This show was chock-full of moments that I did not care for and that added nothing to the story. At one point they even had Maya’s friend who appeared for 2.5 seconds to conveniently give her a nanny cam and talk about how she’s still being stalked by her ex or something, for the friend never to appear again.

Literally, the best part of this show were the secondary characters. They carried Fool Me Once on their backs while Maya was galavanting around and pretending she didn’t know who killed her husband and that she wasn’t ready for some kids to take the fall for her. The husband of Maya’s sister was more engaging than Maya. Her niece and nephew were more interesting, if not useless, than Maya. So was her best friend Shane, who seemed to have a deeper connection with Maya’s child Lily then she did even though Fool Me Once tried to make it seem like she was doing everything in her power to protect her child. She wasn’t. She was so focused on her grief that that’s all that mattered. Even Marty, the himbo queer officer, was infinitely more interesting and heartfelt than Maya.

But Maya and all of the secondary characters pale in comparison to Sami, played by Adeel Akhtar. He was the grumpy detective on the case of who killed Maya’s husband Joe aka Richard Armitage. And it became clear very quickly that he valued his new lease on life and was very concerned with the fact that he was passing out and losing time. He wanted to get married to his fiance and he wanted to be there for his son or daughter. And Akhtar absolutely knocked it out of the park and made me feel a wealth of emotion for Sami and what he was going through. Every connection he had made the show better. I loved his relationship with his young partner Marty and how he didn’t even blink when he revealed that he was dating a man. I love this connection with his fiance Molly, their chemistry palpable from the very first moment they danced on screen. It even came to the point that Maya was more interesting when she was in scenes with Sami.

It is Akhtar who also made me cry in Fool Me Once. It felt unfathomable because the entire show was a shit show of false leads that led nowhere and ended up with Maya bouncing from her daughter’s life instead of facing the consequences of her actions and making sure her daughter didn’t live a life without her. But Sami broke me. There was love in everything that he did. And when it was revealed that Nicole, who I thought was his AA sponsor, was actually his murdered fiance…I broke. Because that was essentially how he saw her, loving and kind and wanting him to keep pushing on in life with his new fiance and baby. But that was also him. She was a manifestation of his mind, and that manifestation wanted to live. He wanted to live.

So, even though I think Fool Me Once was a complete disaster that sold me on a story and made the viewer a fool for thinking that in the trailer had a speck of truth to it, it’s Sami, Molly, Eddie, Marty, and Shane that made the story worthwhile. But that doesn’t mean that I would play the show again to revisit these characters. I could probably watch the scenes on YouTube and be satisfied. Because this mess, I’m glad it’s over. And hopefully I will never have to think about Maya Stern or this absolutely unhinged, and not in an entertaining way, jumble of a plot that had more false leads than it did actors who did a good job.

Fool Me Once is now available on Netflix.

What did you think of Fool Me Once? Let us know in the comments below!