It’s fairly common for book-to-screen adaptations to eliminate minor characters or plotlines from their source material. Director Peter Jackson famously deleted the mysterious figure of Tom Bombadil from his blockbuster Lord of the Rings trilogy, as his antics in J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels added little to the plot and slowed the pace. Steven Spielberg’s 1975 megahit Jaws trimmed novelist Peter Benchley’s unnecessary subplot about an extramarital affair. But the new Netflix series The One, based on John Marrs’ 2018 SF novel, goes further than those classics, keeping the novel’s premise but getting rid of pretty much everything else. It premieres on the streaming service on March 12.

The central conceit of the book and TV show, both set in  England, is that a biotech company has created a method that allows people to find the perfect love match—“the one,” if you will—with a simple DNA test. The science is vague, but it basically boils down to the notion that everyone has a single, specific gene that bonds them to a single other person. It’s best not to think about it too hard, as it raises a lot of questions; for instance, what if your genetic match has a deeply annoying personality? Can that person really be “the one”? In any case, the author (and the series’ producers) seem to assume—perhaps rightly—that audiences will just go with it.

Marrs’ novel takes this basic idea and develops it in stories of five different main characters, whose plots rarely overlap. One focuses on a divorced, lonely woman named Mandy, whose quest for a love match entangles her with her soulmate’s deeply dysfunctional family. In another, serial killer Christopher is paired with a police detective, and he’s deeply confused by the fact that he has genuine feelings of affection for her. A financially strapped woman named Jade finds out that the one for her lives in Australia; she decides to surprise him by turning up at his doorstep, only to find out that he’s terminally ill and cared for by his brother—but not all is what it seems. Nick is engaged to be married to a woman, and they take to test to confirm their compatibility, only to find out that Nick’s match is an employee at a local gym—and a man, which surprises Nick, who’s never been sexually attracted to other men before. Ellie is the massively wealthy founder of the Match Your DNA company who developed the test under shady circumstances, and her match turns out to have an earth-shattering secret.

Marrs is overly fond of chapter-ending cliffhangers, but they do keep the pages turning, despite some stilted turns of phrase (“Ellie hated that she had fallen in love with a man with a hidden agenda”) and occasional serial-killer gruesomeness. The twists and turns are nonstop, and although the novel drags a bit near the end, it impressively manages to resolve its many plots.

The Netflix series, by contrast, is fairly open-ended after its eight episodes—apparently to allow for a possibility of second season—and it features none of these characters or storylines. Its central plot delves into the murky origins of the DNA test and its main discoverer (Hitman: Agent 47’s Hannah Ware), but here, her name is Rebecca, not Ellie, and her backstory is entirely different. Her former friend, Ben (Amir El-Masry from the Amazon Prime Video thriller series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan), recently turned up dead, and a cop named Kate (Nightflyers’ Zoë Tapper) is on the case. She soon suspects that something shady is going on, which may be connected to the genesis of Rebecca’s company, The One. Meanwhile, Kate, who’s bisexual, is matched with a Spanish woman who has secrets of her own. In an unrelated plot, Hannah (A Discovery of Witches’ Lois Chimimba) secretly orders a DNA test for her husband, Mark (Harlots’ Eric Kofi-Abrefa), to see if they’re soulmates, only to find out that another person is his match; she tracks down the other woman to figure out what it is about her that makes her so special, but this only leads to further complications.

The show’s creators seem to think that Rebecca’s plot is the most compelling, and although Ware gives a fun performance (reminiscent of Heather Locklear’s on the late, great primetime soap Melrose Place), many viewers will find Hannah and Mark’s story to be far more interesting; Chimimba, in particular, truly sells the feeling of insecurity that such a DNA test would bring, and she does it with relatable humor, which the other plotlines mostly lack, although Rebecca's ruthless ways can be darkly amusing at times.

In the end, perhaps the most effective strategy is to treat the book and series as a part of a continuum. If you like the premise, you can’t go wrong with either, as both have distinct soap-operatic appeal. It’s a huge fictional universe, with two hearts that beat as one.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.