Apple TV has landed on the cruelest premise on television this year, and the worst part is how little it needs to explain itself. Ian Ridley takes emergency calls for a living. Eleven years ago his three-year-old daughter Maggie went missing from their home, and the hunt for her took his career, his marriage and most of his sobriety with it. He sits in a room every night with a headset on, listening to strangers have the worst hour of their lives, waiting for a call that is never going to come. Then, at the end of the second episode, it comes.
“Last Seen” premiered globally on Apple TV on Wednesday with two episodes, and the remaining four land weekly through the finale on 7 October. Patrick Brammall plays Ian, adapted onto the screen by Kris Mrksa from Ryan David Jahn’s 2011 novel “The Dispatcher,” with Christian Schwochow directing all six hours. It is set and shot in Victoria, in a fictional coastal town called Port McKenna, and it is a slower, sadder animal than the trailer sells. Warning beyond this point there are full spoilers for the first two episodes of “Last Seen,” including what the DNA test finds, who the girl on the farm turns out to be, and exactly how that phone call ends.
He sits in a room every night with a headset on, listening to strangers have the worst hour of their lives, waiting for a call that is never going to come.”
Episode one, called “The Dispatcher,” opens on a man in flooded bushland after a storm, calling for his three dogs. One of them will not come. He reaches into its mouth and pulls out the jawbone of a small child, and that is the first domino. The remains belong to a child of three or four, buried near where Ian lives, and Ian does what a former detective with nothing left to lose does: he drives straight to the scene and starts working it himself. Dog prints at the burial site lead him to an unlicensed breeder, Peter Mulligan (Fletcher Humphrys), and at Mulligan’s place he finds Maggie’s old pajamas. Six months of sobriety hold right up until they do not. He relapses, gets into a fight, lands in custody, and his sponsor Donald Reid (Daniel Henshall) comes to collect him. Then, at a vigil held for Maggie, Detective Isabel Pena (Zahra Newman) tells him the DNA is back and the remains are not his daughter. He came for an ending and got handed the search back.
What the audience gets, and Ian does not, is the answer. Maggie is alive. She is fourteen now, she answers to Sarah, and she lives on an isolated farm with Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna Reid (Maxine Peake), a reclusive fundamentalist couple who have raised her to believe that everything past the property line will hurt her. Music, phones, parties, other teenagers: none of it is hers. And this is where Mrksa’s arithmetic gets quietly clever. In Jahn’s novel Maggie is taken from her bedroom at seven and calls her father seven years later, at fourteen. Here she is taken at three and calls him eleven years later, at fourteen. Same age on the phone, twice as long gone. The show wanted a girl old enough to start working out that her own life is a lie, and it wanted her to have no memory of the truth underneath it, and doubling the missing years is the only way to get both. She is not a prisoner counting days in a basement. She has been overwritten.
Episode two, “The Call,” is about that overwriting starting to fail. A damaged pamphlet from Maggie’s vigil finds its way into Sarah’s hands, and something in it catches: she knows the name Mags, and she remembers carving it into a tree. She slips out with Tommy Brenton (Felix Cameron), the local boy who is her only working connection to the ordinary world, and her first taste of a normal teenage night goes wrong almost immediately. She loses him at a party, finds a phone booth, and dials 000. Ian picks up. She tells him her name is Sarah, then says maybe it is Mags, and he tells her that he is her father before running for the door. The booth is empty when he gets there. He has waited eleven years for that call and he misses her by minutes, which is a far nastier piece of writing than simply keeping her hidden for another four hours would have been.
The structural choice underneath all this is the interesting one, because “Last Seen” refuses to play the game its genre usually plays. It does not hoard its reveal. By the end of episode one you can already see the shape of what happened, and the show is fine with that, because it is not asking who took Maggie so much as what everybody involved will do now. Carly Lane at Collider called it a pivot from whodunit to whydunit, and that reads right. The Guardian’s Luke Buckmaster made the sharper observation: the phone call is all over the marketing, but the thing that actually fires the story is the body in the bushland, which arrives first and does more damage. The best invention is quieter than either. Donald, the sponsor who scrapes Ian off the floor and talks him back from the bottle, is Henry’s brother. The man holding Ian together is family to the man who took his daughter, and not one of the three of them knows it.
Brammall is the reason the whole thing stays upright, and it is worth saying how odd a year this is for him. He is closing out “Colin from Accounts,” the romantic comedy he co-created and co-writes with Harriet Dyer, on Paramount+ this month, and he turned up in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” back in May. Ian is the polar opposite of all of that: bitter, obsessive, frequently the least reasonable person in the room, and still somebody you want to see win. There is a shot early on of him eating dinner alone with an unopened vodka bottle sitting on the table in front of him, which tells you more about his sobriety than any speech could. Cowell is the counterweight, playing Henry with a stooped, careful, unhurried menace, and Peake gives Jenna a guilt that keeps leaking out around the edges of a woman who is supposed to be the calm one. Chloe Jean Lourdes carries most of the show’s emotional weight as Sarah, and Apple’s own billing introduces her, because this is her first screen role.
The rest of the rebuild goes further than “based on the novel” usually means. Jahn’s book is set in Bulls Mouth, East Texas, where dispatcher Ian Hunt takes a 911 call from a daughter who has just been formally declared dead, and it becomes a bullet-strewn chase along Interstate 10 from Texas to California. Mrksa kept the call and binned the chase. What he also kept is the better catch: in the novel, the girl on the line says “Sarah. No, my name is Maggie, Maggie Hunt.” Sarah is a name she has been handed, and the book throws it away inside a single breath. The series takes that discarded half-line and builds eleven years of a stolen life on top of it. The traces are all over the cast list once you look. The man who took her is still called Henry. The ex-wife is still Debbie, her new husband is still a Bill with a badge, and the show still spent its development under the book’s title, “The Dispatcher,” before somebody decided this version was not about the job at all.
It comes from 60Forty Films, the outfit behind “Hijack,” “Slow Horses” and “Down Cemetery Road,” alongside Joanna Werner’s Werner Film Productions (“The Newsreader,” “Clickbait”), and it has been reported as the first Apple TV series made and filmed entirely in Australia. On the evidence here that is not a trivia note: the flooded bushland, the flat coastal light and the particular awkwardness of a small-town vigil are all doing real work. Critics who have seen all six are close to agreeing, with one shared reservation. Buckmaster gave it five stars in The Guardian and called it “riveting television, and one of the standout shows of the year,” singling out cinematographer Bonnie Elliott. Brian Tallerico gave it three out of four at RogerEbert.com for its nuanced character work. Nick Bythrow at ScreenRant went 7 out of 10 and flagged a decision around the midpoint that leaves the middle choppy, while Lane noted a late flashback episode that drops the pace. The doubt is specific and it lands in the same place twice: the back half. Four episodes are left, titled “The Lie,” “The Truth,” “The Prophet” and “The Choice,” and given what Henry Reid is, the fifth one is where we would put our money.
What Do You Think? Was making Maggie three years old instead of seven the change that turns this from a kidnapping thriller into something genuinely upsetting, or does it let Henry and Jenna off too easily by making Sarah complicit in her own story? Is Donald being Henry’s brother the kind of coincidence a six-episode series can carry, or does it start to strain the moment Ian gets close? And after a near miss that cruel, does the show owe us a reunion, or has it already told us it is not that kind of show?
See you on the next binge!
