Now, here's a thing! The evil MSM has published an average review of last night's episode! Whatever next?! Still, I agree with some of the criticisms in this - from today's Times:
Not for the first time, you might say, I feel as if I have been watching a different programme from the rest of the nation. I am clearly meant to have strong opinions about The Missing and I really don’t. As a father, I should be chilled to the freezer cabinet by the disappearance of a five-year-old. As a viewer am I not outraged that, post the McCann tragedy, child abduction is seen fit for TV drama? Yet missing children are not an uncommon dramatic trope; we endured The Secret of Crickley Hall on BBC One in 2012, Torn on ITV in 2007, and various episodes of Without a Trace on Sky. Literature has been breaching this taboo for years: Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, Peter Pan, Oliver Twist, The Turn of the Screw and Lolita all feature it. To be frank, I know the difference between fact and fiction, and I can cope.
The question, as always, is how the subject is treated. The Missing clearly deals with little Oliver’s disappearance in a more sophisticated way than the silly ghost story Crickley Hall. The procedural aspects — the Amber Alert procedure et al — are, apparently, accurate. There is proper emphasis on the emotional consequences for Oliver’s parents: in last night’s second episode Tony and Emily had their first fight and first sexual failure since the disappearance, the first missteps towards their foretold separation in the present day. James Nesbitt as Tony is giving his all to his portrayal of grief turned to rage. The filming is artily melancholy.
For all that, however, the Williams brothers’ drama constantly teeters on the edge of whodunit hackery: the second-hand shop with the vital clue; the suddenly discovered child’s drawing in the cellar; the demonic journalist with the bottomless expense account; even the “philosophical” French cop, playing the Nazis’ favourite Liszt rhapsody, because it reminds him we are all a mix of good and evil. The most offensive thing about The Missing is that, because it has subtitles and “ing” in its title, it thinks it is as good as The Killing. It isn’t.
