TV: Missing

It's fun to write about ABC's new spy show, "Missing," because the series brazenly rips off the hit Liam Neeson action movie, "Taken." In both the show and the movie, rogue CIA agents search for their kidnapped offspring in exotic locales, leaving a trail of beat-up Eurotrash in their wake:



Which is not to say that "Missing" is a good TV show. Actually, the series is awful in a lot of ways: you'll see tepid television-sized action sequences and hear hackneyed dialogue (including the phrase "I'm a mother searching for her son" about eighty times per episode). The biggest problem, though, is the plot.

The events in "Taken" could afford to be conveniently strung together since they only occupied about an hour and a half of screentime; stretch the same happenings into a ten-episode first season and you have long moments of boredom, weird decisions by the characters, and utterly foreseeable plot twists (hint - if you don't see someone die in a car bomb, they're probably hanging around somewhere until the season finale).

I'm sure "Missing" will be popular, since it's part of a three hour block of television aimed at middle aged women (including Shonda Rhimes' megahits "Grey's Anatomy" and "Private Practice"), but I don't think it'll ever be must-see television.