Subtitles:

English (SDH), Spanish, none

Extras:

Imperiled children have been central to other dark, quality cable series of late, including "The Killing," "Top of the Lake" and "Broadchurch." It does give a story a certain weight and heat. After having lived through so many murder mysteries, police procedurals and slasher films, what's one more grown-up murdered or missing? We carry on. A child victim shocks us back to attention, shifts the ground under our feet, etches loss with acid.

Cutting back and forth between the summer of 2006 and the winter of 2014, "The Missing" is at once an unfolding mystery and a cold-case story. James Nesbitt and Frances O'Connor play Tony and Emily Hughes, a London couple vacationing in France with their 5-year-old son, Oliver. Their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere (a familiar horror movie trope), and they are forced to put up in a country town whose populace has been temporarily deranged by the 2006 World Cup as the French team battles toward the finals.

The opening scenes — in which the facts of the case are slowly established in the present tense, while in the past the family proceeds toward a loss you know is coming — have the suspense and swing of good Alfred Hitchcock; indeed, Hitchcock made his own lost-child movie, "The Man Who Knew Too Much," and liked it enough to make it again, and there is some tonal resemblance between Nesbitt here and the driven James Stewart in the 1956 version of the Hitchcock film. 

But it’s that way with almost every character in the series: Those whose eyes you happen to be looking through seem to reveal the world as it is, or ought to be, but only at that moment. When you first see Emily circa 2014 and realize just how much her circumstances have changed since 2006 — and what probably needed to happen in order to change them — you identify with her, and see Tony’s mission as one of denial transmogrified into distracting madness.

The series continues to do this as it unfolds, giving you the points of view of townspeople, public officials, friends and relatives of the leads, and characters who have joined the story in 2014 but didn’t know any of the key players eight years earlier. Amazingly, this multiplicity of viewpoints doesn’t fragment the show but seems to strengthen and deepen it.

And for all of its almost scientific attention to the granular details of shifting emotion and point of view, The Missing also has an eye for beauty. Every few minutes, there’ll be a shot or series of shots that are lovely in and of themselves, or that seem to express a profound love or sorrow that’s beyond words and perhaps beyond narrative: a car stalled at a crossroads, a father and his son floating in the deep blue water of a swimming pool, a woman’s finger dragging along a polished tabletop. This is one of the year’s very best TV programs, hard as it sometimes is to endure.

Gary Tooze

April 11th, 2015