Adam Price's (Richard Armitage) quiet life is changed when a stranger (Hannah John-Kamen) confronts him and tells him a psychological thriller mystery about his wife (Dervla Kirwan) based on the Harlan Coben novel of the same name.

While HBO and Netflix have always been competitors to some degree, with Netflix jealous of the consistent quality of HBO and HBO jealous of the scale of Netflix, it has been kind of amusing to see the two go head-to-head with two shows that practically share a name recently. That would be Netflix’s The Stranger, adapted from a Harlan Coben mystery novel, and HBO’s The Outsider, adapted from a Stephen King mystery novel.

The main problem with The Stranger is that it’s too convoluted for its own good. If it had stayed with its central concept, mystery woman reveals powerful secret to man about his wife, that would have been good enough to carry things forward.

Instead, you get all these side-storylines about countless other secrets being revealed or threatened to be revealed, and then some winding side-tales that have little to do with anything else (pretty much any of the storylines involving the teenage kids of the main families).

The Stranger herself is a very odd character and not a very compelling villain. Things get confusing rather quickly when one minute she’s telling secrets just for the sake of it, and then the next she starts blackmailing other people with similar secrets, and the line between who “deserves” to know something and who is extorted for money is almost non-existent, and is not adequately explained by the end.

Hannah John-Kamen is the series’ best asset, yet is underutilized the entire time, and her character actually gets less interesting the more we learn about her, including what ends up being a somewhat predictable final turn. And she’s not the only mysterious bad guy lurking, as one other “reveal” by the end is something that makes almost no sense if you go back and watch some of the earlier episodes (which I’m now doing as my wife takes the series for a spin). Again, it’s a product of over-complexity of the storyline. The Stranger has a good hook with the secret-telling woman, and yet it’s a story that gets less intriguing the more mysteries are unraveled.

The Outsider fixes this problem. We have a clear line being established with one central villain, this one being a supernatural entity, where Coben’s story doesn’t delve into that realm. Again, we have an equally compelling hook. A man (Jason Bateman) assaults and murders a young boy with plenty of physical evidence to convict him, and yet video proof puts him miles away the day of. He’s legitimately in two places at once.

As the series expands, it focuses almost entirely on just this main storyline, not getting bogged down in distractions or additional twists and turns. This “duality” concept is traced from person to person and similar crimes, and this time, the more we learn about the entity behind all this, the more terrifying and interesting the entire show becomes.