- Network: ABC
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 15, 2012
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Critic Reviews
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Your eyes are in for a treat, and Judd grows on you.
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Think "The French Connection" meets "Alias" with a big helping of Taylor Lautner's "Abduction."
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This bifurcated character--Mother of the Year meets Jack Bauer--isn't always believable, but Judd welds the two Beccas together through sheer willpower. [19 Mar 2012, p.41]
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Missing may be 2 percent inspiration and 98 percent perspiration with all of its action scenes, but it's fun to watch. Judd classes up the joint nicely.
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Yes, you've seen it before. But, hey, you haven't seen it with Ashley Judd.
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Judd, who serves as series co-executive producer, makes for a surprisingly convincing action hero. It's when she stops to emote in full mommy mode that the show drags.
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If you view it as, say, a USA show with less humor but much higher production values, with attractive people having adventures you can enjoy while doing the laundry or sorting through junk mail, it'll do the job for now.
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The acting is solid, the scenery is appealing and Becca's quest to find her son provides a fair bit of dramatic tension. But what's really missing is credibility.
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While these [butt-kicking] scenes contain a certain intensity and exhilaration, you can't help but think that, had the writers of Missing devoted as much time to plot and character as they did to the fighting, they might have wound up with a much more enjoyable show.
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As drama it has a few holes and clearly a lot of backstory that will unspool at its own pace....But the narrative is crisp, fast and easy to follow.
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It may not be groundbreaking, but for Judd fans, Missing isn't the worst way to lose an hour.
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Nice locales (Paris! Rome!), a couple of decent action sequences... but otherwise a tepid potboiler over-seasoned with too many spy tropes and a plot with too many gaping holes.
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The international settings are pretty and Judd does her damnedest with what she's got, but Missing's tough-mom role and poorly paced, unsuspenseful suspense scenes make the series hard to root for.
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Missing's clue unraveling is barely believable when it's not simply preposterous.
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Despite pacy editing, superb action choreography, and location shooting across Europe, the whole turns out to be yet another re-run of that updated Western, 24, which pits an arrogant outlaw protagonist against friend and foe alike.
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What viewers are left with, then, are some excellent fight and chase scenes, an outstanding supporting cast (who, alas, only highlight the main character's deficiencies) and a lot of truly beautiful location work. It may be enough, but it could, and should, have been so much more.
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Missing barely winks at the silliness it slings.
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It prefers action at points where it could really stand to slow down and build out a slightly more creative story. It's the very definition of a guilty-pleasure series.
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A supremely silly series that takes itself incredibly seriously.
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Aside from the fact spying and parenting don't mix, though, there's nothing fresh about Missing.
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The premiere boasts intriguing hints of self-awareness but never quite follows through on them, and that's too bad.
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Missing, created by the screenwriter Gregory Poirier, isn't a particularly good show. The dialogue is mostly wooden, and the plot, through two episodes, is standard spy-story stuff.
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So while the one-liners are sub-CSI: Miami ("Time to upgrade," quips Becca as she overrides a security system; "Oh, no," she monotones upon discovering a corpse), the cinematography and fight choreography serve to at least temporarily keep both the audience and cast breathless.
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If the show were as exciting as it is improbable, Missing could qualify as a guilty pleasure. All it's missing are a few crucial ingredients: originality and intelligence.
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Missing is like a bad Lifetime movie blown up into a weekly series.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 21 out of 34
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Mixed: 4 out of 34
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Negative: 9 out of 34
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Mar 16, 2012
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Mar 16, 2012
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Mar 15, 2012