TV: Vanished

Sara Collins (Joanne Kelly) sits at her desk, nervously talking on the phone. We hear only her end of the conversation, which ends with her saying, "My husband is home. And don't ever call me here again." She greets her husband, Jeffrey (John Allen Nelson, the best thing about the first episode) in the foyer with "I need to tell you something," but before she can tell him anything, he's pulled away on important business by one of his aides. Jeffrey and Sara never do get to have that important conversation, because they have to get to a banquet honoring Sara for her charity work; just before she's due to give the opening remarks, Sara disappears, apparently the victim of a kidnapping.

Enter the FBI, in the form of Graham Kelton (Gale Harold) and Lin Mei (Ming-Na). He is, as TV cops must be, haunted by his disastrous last case, in which a preteen kidnap victim was killed by his captors during a rescue attempt. Sadly, Harold doesn't quite have the gravitas to make him a convincing FBI agent, much less an emotionally wounded one; it's like watching a poodle try to play a Doberman. (If we could find a happy medium between Harold's lightweight performance in this show and Jeremy Sisto's overly brooding performance in Kidnapped, we'd have a terrific FBI agent). As Lin Mei, Ming-Na gives the same flat, affectless performance she's been giving for the last ten years or so; her face is so cold and immobile that you might think her the victim of a tragic Botox accident.

It appears that Vanished will be one of those shows that's going to hand us a lot of goofy plot twists and over-the-top revelations. There's a home pregnancy test (with a positive result) in Sara's bathroom? Then of course, we must learn from her parents tell Sara is infertile. Jeffrey's daughter Marcy has a hunky young boyfriend with shifty eyes? Then of course, we must find a bloody shirt and a hidden backpack of money in his laundry room.

And we haven't even gotten to Jeffrey's ex-wife and the ambitious TV reporter and the body that's had some sort of ritual tattoo applied posthumously and the suggestion that some sort of mysterious Da Vinci Code-esque secret society is involved. It's all wildly farfetched, and that sort of thing works best when a show is willing to go indulge its goofiness to the max and just have fun. Lost, for instance, or the recently departed Alias, simply dove into the deep end of preposterousness and asked the audience to suspend almost every shred of disbelief. Based on the first episode, though, I'm afraid that Vanished is going to take itself too seriously; instead of being carried along by the plot twists in an exhilirating rush, we plod from one revelation to another, every one of them treated with far too much solemnity.

I'll give the show another week or two, in the hopes that it'll find the right tone for its story elements, but I can't say I'm optimistic.