TV Review: Vanished

Originally written on August 22, 2006. I have absolutely no memory of watching this show. I don’t think I watched another episode and it was cancelled not very long after. – Mat

Fox has been hyping their new mystery series Vanished for weeks. Hoping for something like 24 meets The Fugitive I stopped watching Italian maestro Dario Argento’s slasher epic Deep Red to watch.

The first episode of any series is difficult, double for an ongoing mystery series where presumably each episode will lead in the next without any loose ends being tied up until much, much later. With all of that introduction of characters and establishment of plot, it’s hard to really get into the meat of the show at first and create enough suspense to keep everyone tuned in next week.

By the midway point of the first episode of Vanished, I was ready to write the show-off and was missing my Italian blood bath.

We are quickly introduced to Senator Jeffrey Collins (John Allen Nelson), his wife Sara (Joanne Kelly), and son Max (John Patrick Amedori) before Sara gets a phone call and just like that, disappears. Just as fast an investigation is brought down and the poor Senator’s wife is suspected of being kidnapped.

FBI agent Graham Kelton (Gale Harold) is running the show and is, of course, as brash as he is awesome. He’s introduced with a flashback of doing some type of ransom cash handoff for a small boy. A sniper shoots the bad guy but not before the boy is blown to bits by the bomb planted on his body. This is supposed to give Agent Kelton a dark, somber side and an attitude that says ‘let me do it my way’ because he didn’t actually want the sniper there, and without the sniper, the boy would have been in one piece, not a thousand.

The problem, midway, was that we’d been introduced to the characters and the core problem, but I didn’t actually care about any of them. The show rests upon the fate of Sara Collins, yet we only actually see her for about 10 seconds, not long enough to develop any emotional attachment to her. The senator and his family are more developed, but in an attempt to make everything more mysterious (and presumably to add more plot twists later on) they don’t come off as too sympathetic. The agent’s back story was just kind of dumb, and there are so many obnoxious but genius crime fighters on TV these days that it’s hard to notice one more.

Ah, but in the back half of the episode, things got more interesting. It seems young Sara was previously kidnapped 12 years ago but the media coverage was covered up. She also apparently had another name as some stranger in a bar tells us after seeing her picture on the television.

The past is even more mysterious as Agent Kelton uncovers the body of a woman who was also kidnapped at the same time as Sara. Her body had been frozen since then and has now been thawing in the house registered to a man who happens to own the same type of gun that shot the waiter who told Sara about her disappearing phone call.

And the body has a card on it bearing the number 9:29. The number nine was also tattooed, post-mortem, on the waiter’s hand.

That’s suspense and has me interested in next week’s show.

While not exactly 24 meets The Fugitive, it’s more like a poor man’s Lost meets Matlock, it has enough juice to make me want to turn in next week. Unless Blockbuster sends me Dario Argento’s Suspira, then all bets are off.