Harry Williams, writing with his brother Jack, builds thrillers that run two clocks at once and care more about the waiting than the answer. The first series of The Missing is the method at its best; later, the plotting sometimes buries the people.
Fi1m perspective
A father lets go of his son's hand in a crowded bar in France, and the boy is gone. That is the first thing The Missing (2014) does, and nearly everything Harry Williams has written since, with his brother Jack, follows the same instinct: put the loss in the opening minutes, then make us live with the not knowing. The brothers cut between the summer the boy vanished and the winter, years on, when James Nesbitt's Tony Hughes comes back to the same town convinced he has found something. The two timelines are not there to be clever. They let us watch a man before and after, and measure the damage.
The Williamses did not start in the dark. Through the mid-to-late 2000s they wrote comedy, Roman's Empire (2007) among it, and pilots for British and American networks. The turn was deliberate. "So it was like, 'Well, let's try something completely different and do something with zero jokes,' because paedophile shows shouldn't really have jokes." The Missing was the result, and it set the pattern for what followed: a family under pressure, a story told out of order, a setting somewhere in Europe with a cast drawn from more than one country. Rellik (2017) told its story backwards. Liar (2017) was built to turn on its twists. Baptiste (2019) took Tchéky Karyo's Julien Baptiste out of The Missing and gave him his own series, and The Tourist (2022) let some of the jokes back in. Since 2014 the brothers have also produced other writers' work through their company, Two Brothers Pictures, Fleabag among it.
What works is the patience. Most crime writers treat the gap between the question and the answer as dead time to be filled; the Williamses treat it as the subject. We came away from the first eight episodes of The Missing wrung out, and it was not the solution that did it. It was watching Nesbitt in the winter scenes, knowing what the summer had already shown us, and seeing what years of not knowing had made of him.
The trouble comes when the method is run harder. The second series of The Missing (2016) moves to another family and another country, adds more threads, and is more ambitious and less sure; the plot starts to need a notebook. Some viewers found the first series exploitative of real child abductions. We understand the objection without sharing it, because the series is about the aftermath and not the crime, but it is a risk the brothers run whenever they build a thriller on this kind of grief.
The brothers write by talking a scene through, dividing it up, going to separate rooms and then reading each other's pages. It may explain why their series so often run on two tracks. Start with the first eight episodes of The Missing, and do not expect to feel better for them.
Biography
Harry Williams is a British television writer and producer. With his brother Jack Williams he created and wrote the BBC anthology series The Missing (2014–2016), and has co-written several other drama series including Liar (2017–2020), The Widow (2019), The Tourist (2022–2024) and Baptiste (2019–2021).
The brothers began their careers writing comedy before moving into drama. They founded the production company Two Brothers Pictures in 2014, which has produced their own series as well as Fleabag (2016–2019). They are the sons of writer and director Nigel Williams and producer Suzan Harrison.
