Where’d It Go?
Vanished… From The Schedules
Amid no fanfare and barely a trailer to be seen, the UK’s fifth terrestrial channel has begun to show another US import. Vanished appears to be a child of the genre that has brought us 24, Prison Break, or Murder One (if you’re a little older) where the action from the entire series revolves around a single story with lots of different threads and characters to provide added intrigue. I was actually quite impressed. There was enough mystery and revelation to keep up viewer interest and, while the acting was a little below par from many of the main characters (and clearly they had not learned the lesson from Kim Bauer of avoiding unnecessary daughters), there were pretty good production values. Part two of the series was shown immediately afterwards on sister channel “five US”, which I can safely say I’ve never seen before and was suitably taken aback by the American voiceover artist that they use to tell us what’s coming up next.
I decided to have a quick surf on the usual websites to see what the future held in a, hopefully, non-spoilery fashion. However, I was little put out to find that the show got cancelled at a mid-point of the first season and nothing ever really gets resolved. This is just a fact of life with American TV but it’s hard to figure out why Channel 5 would be happy to fork out cash on such a dead-end series. To be honest, despite the fact it was quite enjoyable fodder, I’ve got better things to do than watch half a series of a story that will never be resolved. Shame.
June 10th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Me too. I knew that it was cancelled half way through it’s first season so I didn’t bother. I was pissed off enough when they cancelled ‘Surface’……
June 24th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Along with Channel 4 and ITV, Five buys its US shows in the Summer, before they’ve aired in the US and before they’ve had a chance to be cancelled. ITV ended up with Raines, Smith, and The Black Donnellys and has quietly snuck them out when no one was looking/ignored them as a result.