Write a decent script — not a masterpiece but one with enough misdirection to keep us guessing. Hire a compelling lead. Imagine your ideal number of episodes, then lop off two or three of them. No, it really isn’t difficult to make a better-than-average TV murder mystery.
ITV’s Gone, now streaming on BritBox following a much-lauded run in the United Kingdom this spring, succeeds mightily on the basis of modest choices. The show stars David Morrissey, a classically trained actor who knows how to fill small screens. It produces half a dozen “aha!” occasions, then revokes each one on the way to a logical conclusion. Most importantly, it exits the stage before we’ve grown sick of it. Hand it to the Brits: They’ve made in six episodes a series we greedy Americans would have stretched to 10.
Morrissey plays Michael Polly, an English headmaster who falls under suspicion after the disappearance of his wife, Sarah. As taciturn as Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, Michael is seemingly incapable of rising to the emotional moment, insisting, for example, that he is still the man to coach the school’s rugby squad even as Sarah’s body turns up in a nearby woods. Attempting to fathom this coldness is Detective Sergeant Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles), an officer as empathetic as Michael is aloof. Quietly appalled by her suspect’s lack of feeling, Annie sets in motion an investigative ordeal that makes little distinction between Michael’s actual innocence or guilt.
Elements of this process will seem bizarre to American viewers. Initially, the lead detective on the case, Annie is soon reassigned as the Pollys’ “family liaison officer,” a role that sees her all but move in with Michael and his grown daughter, Alana (Emma Appleton). The idea, one supposes, is that an on-the-scene police representative can answer questions as they arise and give comfort to the victim’s family. Yet Michael is himself suspected of the murder. Whereas Gone’s writers presumably see Annie’s domestic omnipresence as an occasion for their main characters to spar, I see a gross violation of the common-law right to a solicitor during police questioning, to say nothing of our own beloved Fifth Amendment.
But never mind. Gone invites viewers to be amateur psychologists, not amateur scholars of Anglosphere constitutions. To put it another way, why Michael doesn’t send Annie packing at once is not a legal question but one having to do with our protagonist’s complicated needs. Rather than shutting the detective out, Michael opens up to her, revealing the shattered (and possibly guilty) man beneath the exterior of stone. All the while, Alana watches in dismay. Did her father kill her mother? Michael won’t say “yes,” but neither — quite — will he deliver a firm “no.”
Gone dips its toes in “toxic masculinity” waters without wading up to its chin. To be sure, the imposing Michael is of a type hardly allowed to exist anymore, but the show reserves just as much scrutiny for its overly feminized police force, a henhouse of gossip and bureaucratic wrangling. Annie, too, gets a turn beneath the microscope of showrunner George Kay (Lupin, Hijack), an examination that produces a useful counterpoint to other programs’ vogue misandrist progressivism. Consider, for example, the detective’s inability to resist the advances of her louche ex-husband (Peter McDonald). Men may be pigs, the series seems to be saying, but women are still lining up to fill the trough.
Kay is right, of course, to make his characters individuals rather than stock figures in a leftist morality play. Other details of the show’s construction are equally distinctive, not least production designer Anna Higginson’s gorgeous interiors and cinematographer Alvaro Gutierrez’s soaring drone shots of Bristol’s Clifton Suspension Bridge. Yet the series is ultimately made by its pacing and cast. About the former, suffice it to say that I was never bored — no small thing for a TV critic in the age of streaming bloat. As for the latter, the assembled actors uniformly succeed, with special honors for Appleton (Traitors) as a young woman who doesn’t know whether to mourn one parent or both.
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The star, however, is clearly Morrissey, a performer perhaps best known to American audiences for playing the governor in seasons three and four of The Walking Dead. A 40-year veteran of stage and screen, the Englishman so perfectly embodies the stern head of a prestigious “public” school that one expects him to get an offer to run such an institution in real life. (Does Eton need a man?) But there is rawness to his performance, too. Only an actor of exceptional technical ability could have pulled off both sides of so contradictory a character.
Gone has been overpraised in some quarters, its many virtues notwithstanding. Contra the Guardian, the series is not “the most engrossing drama we’ll see this year” but a well-made, agenda-free exercise in genre storytelling. That it has turned so many heads mostly indicates how starved we all are for simple quality. So how about it, streaming giants? There’s a lesson here. Which one of you will learn it?
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.