The first six seasons it was on
the air I religious watched The Big Bang Theory. I always thought it received both a fair
amount of recognition from the Emmys and never enough: while the show and
particularly Jim Parsons' won a huge number of awards during its run the overwhelming
majority of the cast – particularly the incredible comic actresses that
gathered when the series started to reach its comic peak after Season 4 – never
got the respect from the Emmys they should have. That was particularly true of
Kaley Cuoco as Penny, who started out as the dumb blonde and ended up being the
comic spark that helped make the show work for twelve seasons.
Unlike her gifted brethren Mayim
Bialik and Melissa Rauch who pursued traditional,
if intriguing, network comedies in the aftermath of the show ending its run
Cuoco chose a darker and more interesting path. Her first major role was in HBO
Max's The Flight Attendant in which she played the title character, an
alcoholic whose one night stand ends up with her being part of international
espionage. Nominated for multiple Emmys in its first season it ended up being
overshadowed by what was going to be an all time classic HBO Max series Hacks
which ended up debuting that spring and deservedly sucked up all the oxygen.
After The Flight Attendant was
cancelled after a lackluster second season Cuoco ended up moving to the even
blacker dark comedy on Peacock's Based on A True Story. She and the
equally gifted Chris Messina played an unemployed married couple with a baby on
the way who in order to make money begin their own true crime podcast and start
listening to a potential serial killer. The flip side of Only Murders in the
Building, it got into even darker territory by the end of the first season with
the characters becoming killers themselves. A critical hit, it was also
canceled after two seasons.
Now Cuoco has abandoned even the
pretense of comedy in her next TV venture Vanished a combination
production between British television and MGM+ which in its relatively short
time in original programming has a capacity for original productions that are
still pretty original. To be sure Vanished is not close to their best
work by far, even by the standards of their work with British Television. It
doesn't have the dark feel of A Spy Among Friends or the everything but
the kitchen sink mentality of Proud Heroes but as I've mentioned
countless times before the British have this way of making things that should
seem formulaic at the very least watchable and frequently riveting.
Like far too many series these
days it opens in medias re watching a motorcyclist with a helmet drive down an
autobahn in Europe. He takes a package and walks to a grubby building. We then
cut to Cuoco with cuts on her face and frantically washing blood of her hands.
When the cyclist knocks on her door she's clearly terrified and tries to delay him,
pushing chairs and furniture against the door while she frantically gets to the
nearest window and manages to pull it open just as whoever it is breaks the
door down. By the time she's leaping onto the garbage bins and running down the
street the viewers knows what's going to happen and sure enough we then cut to
the title that says: "One Week Earlier."
Then we see Cuoco who we quickly
learn is named Alice walking into a luxury hotel looking for a man in the
lobby. We quickly learn (after some well-choreograph but not explicit sex) that
this is her boyfriend Tom and that they've been seeing each other pretty much
steadily for four years. Alice is an archaeologist Tom runs a charity. Alice
has just been offered a tenured professorship in Princeton and she thinks it is
well-past time they settle down and become serious. Tom sounds enthusiastic.
Almost from the start there are
signs Tom is not who he appears to be; he's always engaging in conversations
that force him to leave the room a few times. When he tells her that they've managed
to score reservations at a luxury hotel in Arles she's more than enthusiastic
to go. They get on a train that will take them there. Tom gets pulled away on a
call and Alice falls asleep.
When she wakes up there's no sign
of Tom. She searches the entire train from top to bottom and can't find him. She
has a frustrating encounter with the conductor, in which only a discussion with
a friendly passengers helps her from coming to blows. She then gets a phone
call where Tom is on the caller ID but when she picks up all she hears is
background noise she can't identify.
Naturally when she gets to a
station and tries to talk to the police, the local gendarme is unhelpful, telling
her that they have to wait 48 hours to file a missing persons report. It
doesn't help Alice's credibility that when she searches Tom's luggage for his
passport, she can't find it. The detective (Matthias Schweigert) tells her
there are three reasons people vanish: "Money, legal problems, and
relationships." When Alice says he doesn't know Tom, the detective asks:
"Do you?"
Tom is very much a presence
despite disappearing in the first twenty minutes of episode one: in large part
because he is played by British heartthrob Sam Claflin and you don't cast someone
like him in a TV show and have him absent after the first ten minutes. More
seriously Vanished looks at the relationship between Tom and Alice as it
began as we see that Alice is beginning to question if she ever did know Tom.
All of this is, as I say, formulaic
but what sells is Cuoco. Still remarkably sexy as she passes forty Alice is the
kind of role that she's been increasingly gravitating towards, a guileless
innocent who is dragged into situations that quickly spiral. Unlike those
series in Vanished Alice gets to play someone who is actually competent
when we first meet her and doesn't need to be led around by the nose.
In the highpoint of the first episode
(all I've seen so far) Alice ends up going back to the train station she thinks
Tom might have left at. In a sequence with no dialogue we watch her retrace
Tom's steps over train tracks (to the point when a train passes just by her we're
as terrified as she is) trying to find some trace of him. When she finds a
chewing gum wrapper that she knows is Tom's it's the kind of detective work
none of her previous characters would have been capable of, even though we're
aware it will come to nought in the first episode.
It helps matters immensely that
by this point 'thrown in the deep end' is essentially Cuoco's brand. She was
doing it even before she had her breakout role in The Big Bang Theory when
she had a role playing a promising witch in the final season of Charmed. Cuoco's
characters are usually women who seem at the surface level like they are out of
their league but quickly prove that they have more going on beneath the surface
than at first glance. Those who dismiss her, like the detective at the end of
the first episode, do so at their own peril.
I'm not expected Vanished to
be much more than a time filler during a February that doesn't have much on any
of the major channels to offer me on a Sunday night. (I don't expect to have
anything of interest until the most recent season of Dark Winds debuts
in March.) But I never miss a chance to watch one of my favorite performers in
anything they do and that has always been true of Cuoco. Watching her try to
solve the mystery of her missing boyfriend is enough to get me through February
and it may even be able to rise above the formula in four episodes. We'll have
to see.
My score: 3.5 stars.
