Harry and Jack Williams’s drama about a boy who vanishes on holiday in France, told across two timelines, cares more about what waiting does to people than about its answer. The first series is superb; the second is more elaborate and less sure.
On a family holiday in France, Tony Hughes (James Nesbitt) lets go of his young son’s hand in a crowded bar, and the boy is gone. Years later he is back in the same town, convinced he has found something. Harry and Jack Williams, who created and wrote the series, tell both years at once, cutting between the summer the boy was lost and the winter his father returns. Our verdict is plain: the first eight episodes are among the best British crime television of their decade, and the second eight, which move to another family and another country, are more ambitious and less sure. We recommend it, with the warning that it is built to hurt.
Nesbitt plays Tony as a man who has turned himself into a nuisance. He shouts at French police officers who stopped listening years ago, he cannot be in a room with his ex-wife without an accusation, and he has made his loss the only thing he is. Frances O’Connor’s Emily has done the harder and less dramatic thing, which is to try to live, and the series does not punish her for it. She has a new partner, Mark Walsh (Jason Flemyng), the police liaison officer from the original case, and the writing lets her be tired rather than tragic.
The moment of the disappearance is the making of the series, and it comes at the end of the first hour. Ole Bratt Birkeland shoots the bar at a child’s height, in the amber light of a room full of shouting men, and Tom Shankland, one of the two credited directors, does not slow it down or cut away. Nesbitt turns round, and his face empties. We felt our stomach go, and we have watched a great many television children vanish. It is the ordinariness that did it: no music cue, no stranger in a doorway, just a hand that is not there.
The two timelines are told apart by light. Birkeland gives the summer hard sun and warm colours and the winter rain and a grey-blue chill, so a glance tells you which year you are in before anyone speaks. The editors, Danielle Palmer, Úna Ní Dhonghaíle and Fiona Colbeck, cut on places rather than faces: a doorway in summer becomes the same doorway in winter, and Paul Cripps’s production design furnishes the town’s hotel and its streets twice, once as a resort and once as somewhere nobody would choose to stay. Dominik Scherrer’s score is mostly low strings and a piano figure that stops rather than resolves. It is used sparingly, which is the right decision for a series in which everyone is already in tears.
The best invention is Julien Baptiste. Tchéky Karyo plays the retired French detective who led the original search as a courteous, limping, patient man who listens to Tony when nobody else will, and whose wife, Celia (Anastasia Hille), would like him to stop. Karyo does almost nothing and holds the screen. He is the thread into the second series, in which Alice Webster (Abigail Hardingham), missing for years, walks back into the town where her parents Sam (David Morrissey) and Gemma (Keeley Hawes) have spent those years not knowing. Morrissey and Hawes are good, Roger Allam and Laura Fraser, as the Stones, are better than the material around them, and Ben Chanan, the other credited director, keeps the same visual grammar. But the plotting grows so intricate that we found ourselves admiring the joinery when we should have been worried about the people.
The first series has faults too. The two timelines land their discoveries with a neatness real life would not manage, and by the sixth hour we could feel the pattern: a lead, a dead end, a drink. The French police are thinly written. And Emily’s story is given about half the attention Tony’s is, which the series seems to know and does not fix.
Most missing-child dramas are about the detective. This one is about the parents, and about the plain fact that time keeps passing whether or not anyone is found.
Watch the first series over a week rather than a weekend; it is designed to be sat with, not gulped. Decide about the second afterwards. It carries a 15 certificate, and its 59-minute episodes will feel longer, which is the point.
