Hot Picks: Gone

Finding a detective show that contains all the tropes that make the genre so popular while also being unique enough to make it stand out is a mystery that TV execs often struggle to solve.

However, Gone, from the pen of George Kay (Hijack, The Long Shadow, Lupin) and produced by New Pictures and Observatory Pictures, may just have all of these elusive components.

While the show is an entirely fictional story, it is loosely based around the career of detective superintendent Julie Mackay, who wrote the book To Hunt A Killer, which explores how she solved the 30-yearold cold case of Melanie Road.

The series follows the character of detective Annie Cassidy, played by Eve Myles (Keeping Faith, Torchwood), a sharp, instinctive investigator with her own complex personal issues. She is investigating Michael Polly, played by David Morrissey (The Long Shadow, Hijack), a respected headmaster whose well-ordered life collapses when his wife, Sarah, disappears.

Polly is calm, controlled and inscrutable – until suspicion turns him into the prime suspect in her vanishing. Kay, who was also exec producer, managed to get Mackay and Robert Murphy (the journalist who co-wrote Mackay’s book) on board to help develop the crime story and accurately reflect how a police officer interacts with someone who is both a suspect and a victim.

“Gone walks a fine line of keeping suspicion firmly on Michael Polly while also inviting the audience to speculate about suspects elsewhere in the story. Every scene can be read both ways,” says Kay. “Did he just say that because he’s guilty or because he is a grieving man, unable to emote? It was a very delicate writing process.”

Although Gone is a gripping mystery, it is also a richly layered character drama and different from other shows because while it follows the structural graph of a police procedural, “at its heart it’s much more about the psychological aspect of stories like this”, Kay says.

“When we started to conceive the show, I talked to David [Morrissey] about the puzzle of how emotional we expect innocent people to be, and he really plays that stoic masculinity brilliantly, which is true to his character and men like him.”

Cassidy, meanwhile, is a gutsy, relatable female lead that audiences will be compelled to follow and who this returnable detective series is built around. “Eve [Myles] is someone who I think audiences immediately – and so naturally – warm to,” says Kay.

“She embodies Annie so much – that shoulder to cry on, to laugh with, to have a cup of tea with – that she carries the heart of this show.” Kay says director Richard Laxton, who previously worked on productions such as Joan and Rain Dogs, “was so brilliant at focusing the drama on character” that it gave confidence to not lean too hard into the expected areas that come with detective shows.

“We were able to free ourselves and move scenes that would usually take place in a police station to the front room in the home of the suspect, which allowed a lot of the two-handers to take on an extra level of tension,” he says.

Maartje Horchner, executive vice-president of content at All3Media International, adds that the “claustrophobic thriller” provides “a fabulous recipe for mystery”.