By Natasha Julius
In the 8:00 hour I settled in to watch Fox’s new far-out conspiracy thriller, Vanished. I’m now beginning to suspect that the far-out conspiracy thriller well may be running dry. How do you go about making a centuries-old secret society reaching to the highest levels of the government boring? Well, for starters, you can promote the hell out of said plot developments and feature none of them in the pilot. Then, you can write a slate of characters that never rise above two dimensions and assemble a cast uniformly committed to staying within the established glowering geometric plane. Finally, you can shoot the whole thing through a blue filter and introduce a maddening act-out grainy screen fade that keeps popping up without regard to commercial breaks.
Some pasty-faced block of wood plays a dour FBI agent who presides over the detonation of a small boy in a confusing bit of atemporal backstory. This tragic event presumably provides the necessary character development that justifies his penchant for acting like a complete dick to everyone around him and walking out on his daughter’s first communion, which inexplicably takes place on a weeknight. Ming Na plays his inappropriately perky and eye-rolling assistant. Rebecca Gayheart plays a television reporter so nakedly driven and ambitious that she begins the proceedings, well, naked and apparently unable to get off unless her cameraman boyfriend suckles a specific spot on her neck. This faux-erotic event presumably provides the necessary character development that explains her ruthless and overwhelmingly bitchy pursuit of the story. She’s frigid, see, and we all know how devoted frigid women are to their careers. It keeps their mind off all that hot, kinky sex their less-inhibited sisters are having.
Oh, there’s also a boring senator, a boring subplot involving his young-adult daughter’s attempt to elope with her dodgy loser boyfriend, and – oh yeah – the titular disappearance of his boring wife, executed in boring fashion by having her simply walk out a door. Yes, it’s almost exactly as exciting as it sounds. Someone needs to pry Esai Morales away from the catering trailer immediately, and every single cast member needs a new haircut.
Aside from that, there’s also the requisite number of eye-rolling moments necessary for a show to appear on Fox. Wifey’s disappearance is barely an hour old before it’s getting wall-to-wall coverage on cable news. The wooden FBI man is lead to a body in an abandoned building by the loudest flock of CGI houseflies ever assembled. One lead is generated by tracing the only model of a certain gun “registered in the state,” despite the gun’s slug having been recovered in the District of Columbia. The list goes on and on. The thing is, a really good Fox show is such dirty fun that you can laugh off these preposterous notions. Who cares whether or not Jack Bauer could really land a commercial jet on a stretch of LA highway? It looks freaking awesome. But when there’s no cornball rip-roaring action sequence to soften the blow, you’re left with plenty of opportunity to wonder why you’re forking over an hour of your precious and finite life to watch this crapfest.
So after that I detoxed with a little PBS.
Posted on August 22, 2006