The Missing

It’s more of a slow burn, a psychological study in grief, guilt and what can happen to a marriage tested by tragedy.

The cinematography is beautiful, with the present cast in a melancholy blue and the past cast in yellow, as if to remind us that terrible things are done in broad daylight. Some minor characters are intriguing.... But The Missing doesn't have much to say about the loss of a child beyond that it's an Unbearable Tragedy.

Painful as that journey may be, the show and these actors hit all the notes that make us want to come along.

This is one of the year’s very best TV programs, hard as it sometimes is to endure.

Nesbitt forcibly conveys the sense of a man who can't stop moving, even to sleep, until he finds his son. At least in the first hour--sorry, the only one I sampled--this feels like the kind of performance that just bought Starz a winner.

It is a riveting, heartbreaking, fascinating drama, taking a subject that could easily have been turned into a Lifetime TV Movie melodrama and making it real with its subtle, character-driven grace notes and the breakneck speed of its elaborate plotting.

The performances are superb at every level, with each actor rising to the challenge of revealing previously unrealized aspects of his or her character. Fortunately, the cast is blessed with a beautifully nuanced script from the Williams brothers.

The Missing, an eight-hour thriller coming to Starz on Saturday, is so tantalizing and haunting that it qualifies as a must-see, even for viewers who might be suffering from serial crime fatigue.

The Missing, written by brothers Harry and Jack Williams and directed by Tom Shankland, is sometimes grueling to watch. But it earns a place in haunting crime drama next to the recent “Broadchurch” and “Top of the Lake.”

While it may not transcend its genre, The Missing is a strong addition to the canon.

The eight-part miniseries, a BBC co-production that begins Saturday on Starz, is handicapped a bit by its overly hotheaded protagonist, played by James Nesbitt. But if his access as a grieving father to crime scenes and witnesses often seems a bit preposterous, the story's many side alleys and turnabouts serve as ample distraction.

Credit the writers and the director--and the various wonderful acting performances you’ll see sprinkled about--for making The Missing something more than just a whodunit.

Its somewhat opaque characters never quite moved me on that level [of "Broadchurch," "Happy Valley" or "Top of the Lake"]. Though it's well made and respectful of its subject matter, something about this show keeps it not at the surface but more or less reliably near it.

The Missing is imaginatively written, well cast, chillingly believable and quite addictive. This kind of story has been told this way before, but somehow that doesn’t make this telling any less compelling.

There have been an awful lot of movies and shows about lost children, but The Missing elevates the familiar dynamic to a new level with a gut wrenching mystery. By the end of the first episode, you really want to know what happened to the tyke while dreading where the answer might take you.

It’s very good, a swift-moving crime thriller that also takes the time to measure the effects of the crime on Tony and Emily’s marriage, their state of mind, and the lives of the French townspeople who were drawn into the investigation and may be again.

An excellent eight-part British mystery reminiscent of The Killing and Broadchurch in its brooding anguish.

Spooning out details and forcing close audience attention to track how events have unfolded on a dual track, it’s the kind of premium drama any network would be proud to have--one in the mold of “True Detective” or “The Killing,” only from the grieving parents’ perspective.

A hard-charging, unfailingly suspenseful mystery whose tonnage of side dramas and veritable school of red herrings don’t, miraculously enough, undermine its strength. Though it is, on occasion, a close call.