By Curt Schleier

Woody Allen once said that he’d never write and direct a mystery.  Mysteries, he contended, were too light and fluffy for someone who saw himself as latter-day Bergman.  But that was of course he came out with MANHATTAN MUREDER MYSTERY.

What changed?  I think over the course of time the public’s perception of mysteries changed.  People realized that what was once genre fiction – put into the same category as, say, romance novels – could in the right hands become literary.  I believe the person most single-handedly responsible for that shift attitude was P.D. James, who almost single-handedly raised mystery writing to an art form.

That was followed on television by PRIME SUSPECT, the British series that helped restore television’s image as an art form.  Now, also from England, comes HBO’s FIVE DAYS, about a woman who disappears mysteriously followed by the disappearance of her children.  As the series title suggests, the five-part series covers five days in the investigation, which actually takes place over an almost two-month period.  (The action unfolds on day one, three, 28, 33 and the 79th day of the investigation.)


Clearly this approach does not allow linear story telling – and that’s a good thing.  What we have instead is an exciting – and I can’t stress exciting enough -- mystery investigation told through a series of character studies.  We see how this all affects the missing woman’s family, the police who are conducting the investigation and others.

It starts when Leanne Wellings (Christine Tremarco) and two of her three children go off to visit her grandfather, who is in a nursing home.  They make some stops along the way – at a dog pound to pick up a pet for the kids and at a flower stall set up along the highway.  Leanne leaves the children in the car while she crosses the road.  Nothing is out of the ordinary until a large lorry – that’s truck to you and me – temporary blocks the kids view.  When the truck moves on, their mother is gone and the flower merchant is packing up and leaving. All that are left are the flowers she purchased lying on the roadway.

The children take the dog and go off walking, presumably in search of their mom.  This is the one discordant note.  The kids are about eight and five, and you’d think they’d know to contact the cops.  But perhaps they just panicked.  In any event they go off on their own and are picked up by a stranger who is every parent’s worst nightmare.  Something happens – though we don’t yet know what.

Meanwhile, grandpa calls the cops when she doesn’t show up on time. But there is no immediate sense of urgency. He’s calling from a nursing home, and we all know how bothersome those older people can be.  But when the cops finally send a constable to investigate, she discovers that Leanne is typically late. 

So when the investigation does begin, it begins cold.

There are two minor problems.  It is occasionally difficult to make out what some of the British actors are saying.


And also it takes a while to figure out who’s who.  At the start of the show there is a montage of characters that can prove overwhelming.  You don’t know who they are or why they are being filmed.  On the other hand, the series is so exquisitely constructed that it all becomes clear relatively soon.  And in a small way, it is a tribute to viewers that the producers have enough faith in our intelligence to trust us to figure it all out.  And we do.

The emotional intensity of the show is intense; there’s a constant sense of foreboding.  This is a don’t miss series.  And the good news is, it will be repeated throughout the week, including the hour before the next episode on Oct. 9.