From 'Twin Peaks' to 'The Killing', we're all familiar with the basic template of 'The Disappearance': an attractive but apparently ordinary teenage girl suffers a grim fate, and the detectives have to understand her dark secrets to figure this out. Cue lots of grieving relatives, red herrings and nasty surprises in an extended format. Some series of this sort are even rather good, but 'The Disapperance' will not be joining my list of favourites. Somehow the characters just don't come individually to life, perhaps in part because everyone is beautiful. And a lot of the plot seems to hang upon the girl's father conducting a shadow of the police investigation in a way I found scarcely credible. Finally, the red herrings are all ultimately revealed to be just that, completely unrelated to the crux of the story. Perhaps the problem is simply that the story isn't sufficient interesting to sustain eight episodes. 'The Killing' had a political dimension whereas 'Twin Peaks' soon went off in its own, original direction. Without any novelty, 'The Disappearance', while nicely put together, lacks any elements to lift it above its genre.
