Is ‘Fool Me Once’ suitable for kids?

Facts are facts: Kids love adaptations of books by Harlan Coben, like the hit new Netflix series Fool Me Once. They love the suspense, they love Joanna Lumley – heck, ever since he helmed two episodes of Marple back in the 2010s, they’ll watch just about anything that David Moore directs.

But is it all too much? Is it possible that Fool Me Once is made up of component pieces of content that a kid might not be able to handle? 

Can your kid handle Fool Me Once?

The answer to the question “Is Fool Me Once appropriate for children?” depends entirely on the child, and whether or not they’re totally metal.

Fool Me Once is, inarguably, rated TV-MA, which is code for “intended for adults, and may be unsuitable for children under 17.” The reasons for this rating: language, smoking, and violence, all of which make sense. It’s a gritty suspense story with a screenplay by one of the lead writers on the original Shameless series, based on a novel lauded by one Amazon reviewer as particularly jarring, thanks to its depictions of “terrifying events, moans, voices that scream torture through her psyche via her PTSD infested nightmares.” Its source material was penned by human Netflix goldmine Harlan Coben, the same author who once wrote “The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn or our petty problems.” It’s bleak.

In short, if you have a particularly hardened, chain-smoking, world-weary kid who’s already got a solid grasp of every word that will get them kicked out of social studies, they’ll probably weather Fool Me Once without a hitch. Otherwise, you might want to wait a few years until they’ve already witnessed a couple of murders and can handle a trip to flavor country.