TV review
If you are a subscriber to a British streaming service, you’ve no doubt noticed a staggering number of crime dramas, ranging from grim police procedurals to cozy whodunits. This might be because of something we in Seattle have in common with the Brits: The weather’s gloomy much of the time, so why not lean into the dark? Choosing just one such show to review feels, to use an out-of-season metaphor, like shoveling the walk while it’s still snowing — is it even worth bothering, with so many shows piling up? — but “Gone,” newly streaming on BritBox, caught my eye. Should you be looking for an escape from summer weather (and yes, some of us are), this show’s six taut episodes will provide a pleasantly icy respite.
Things get set up nicely in the first episode, with somebody missing who’s quickly reclassified, by the end of the hour, as somebody dead. We’re in Bristol in southwestern England, where a scarily high suspension bridge looks down on the city with a casual menace, and the unfortunate corpse is Sarah Polly, wife of local headmaster Michael Polly (David Morrissey). Detective Sergeant Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles), who in the manner of all television detectives is a rule-breaker with a rather complicated personal life, is assigned to the case. Suspicion falls on Michael, who in the manner of all fictional British headmasters is taciturn, brusque and vaguely sinister-looking, with a way of speaking that involves not moving his face very much. Is he a brutal wife-killer, or just a guy not in touch with his emotions?
None of this is reinventing the crime-drama wheel, but “Gone” (created by George Kay, whose credits include “Lupin”) is made with competence and subtlety. It’s handsomely filmed, with the boys school in particular getting some beautifully dusty light, and full of intriguing secondary characters: Michael’s daughter Alana (Emma Appleton), a teacher at the school who seems haunted by something in her past; Annie’s estranged husband Craig (Peter McDonald), who slowly morphs throughout the series from jovially repentant to something rather darker; the school secretary Simone (Amanda Lawrence), whose quiet competence might mask some feelings for Michael. (And someone, somewhere, had a sense of humor on this otherwise quite dour show: A brief glimpse of a news website shows the headline “Historic Oak Tree Allegedly Haunted by Very Polite Ghost.”)
But, as with all detective shows, “Gone” rises or falls on its central duo. Morrissey brings interesting shadings to Michael, a man with no compunction about making his daughter read his late wife’s diary out loud (complete with details of an affair), and who methodically grades papers while being grilled about his wife’s disappearance. (You see his logic — the papers need to be graded, no matter what’s happened — but also the glimpse of a heart carefully closed off.) “You rally,” he tells his students, urging them to push on in hard times. And yet he breaks, just a few times, that hardened cloak dissolving. Annie, who’s not one to romanticize crime suspects, is intrigued by him; they start to confide in each other, unexpectedly, and you wonder if she’s playing with fire.
Myles’ Annie gets some of the series’ sharpest dialogue, and knows just how to twist it: A colleague comments on how Sarah’s phone showed that she barely called Michael at all. “Is that so weird?” Annie wonders. “They’re married,” said her colleague. “That’s what I mean,” is the tart reply. (Later, she asks a suspect, “When did it start, this affair you weren’t having?”) But that toughness is something she wears for her job, like her sensible plaid shirts; like Michael, there’s something more vulnerable that’s buried. You see Annie gazing at Craig and wondering if she can somehow will him to be somebody else, the person she needs him to be; you see Annie’s devotion to the aging mother of a cold-case victim long ago, a story that just might continue into a hypothetical Season 2. Which I would, for the record, absolutely watch, on a rainy Saturday someday.
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