Gone Review: The Most Engrossing Drama of the Year
David Morrissey delivers a masterful performance in ITV's tense crime drama Gone, a six-part series that will completely subvert your expectations. This shrewdly crafted show follows Michael Polly, a private school headteacher whose wife Sarah mysteriously disappears, setting in motion a chain of events that explores guilt, co-dependence, and the burden of professional expectations.
What Gone Is Not
Easier perhaps to list what Gone is not, if only to give viewers something familiar to grasp before everything begins sliding into a pit of churning unease. This is not a sitcom, not a musical, not a cooking show presented by sockless men with forearms like hams, not a documentary about whales, and certainly not Richard Osman's House of Games.
While ostensibly a crime drama about a missing wife, Gone serves as merely the sales pitch to get through the front door. Behind this premise squirm a multitude of wrigglier, trickier elements: the nature of guilt and co-dependence, preoccupied schoolboys, the banality of evil, and unusually large dalmatians uncovering corpses in glades. Every hideously tense second feels weighted with the sense that something profound or awful is about to rear up from the bracken and thwack our preconceptions.
The Unreadable Headmaster
The story unfolds in Bristol, where St Bartholomew's stiff-backed headteacher Michael Polly watches a school rugby match with expressionless detachment. When his team wins, Michael appears curiously unmoved, and his emotional distance becomes even more apparent when he discovers his wife Sarah missing from their chocolate box cottage.
As night falls with no sign of Sarah, daughter Alana grows increasingly distraught. "Dad," she says hesitantly, "I'm getting frightened. Did you, did you ... argue?" Michael's response comes after a telling silence: "We didn't argue. We never do."
When police eventually become involved, watchful DS Annie Cassidy notes Michael's unusual calmness. "I have 160 pupils about to sit exams," he explains. "Those predicted grades will determine which universities they go to. The fact that their headmaster's wife has not been seen for 24 hours shouldn't concern them."
Annie narrows her eyes, later musing to a colleague, "I mean, there's a lot that's not right there."
A Closed Book Character
Fastidious Michael, with his prewar haircut and neatly pressed waistcoat, remains firmly, crisply unreadable throughout. Not exactly a blank canvas—this is David Morrissey, after all, and few actors can do more with a fleeting nostril-twitch—but very much a closed book. Great pains have been taken to hammer shut his emotional vault, possibly smothered in garlic before being sealed in lead.
He seems oblivious to the discomfort of those around him, prompting Annie's gloriously rumpled friend Carol to observe, "He's a headmaster. He'll be used to getting it all his own way." Annie, who has cohabited with the type before, responds with a thoughtful "Hmm."
Building Suspense and Subverting Expectations
Other narrative threads weave through the main mystery. Schoolboy Dylan appears burdened by something unspoken. A cold case involving a missing teenager re-emerges from the past. Lingering aerial shots capture dense woodland—not the common sort with fly-tipped toilets, but the well-to-do variety where dog-walkers wave to one another and corpses have the decency to wear Barbour.
Gone makes viewers work for their supper, with clues arriving slowly from unexpected angles. Just when you think you understand what's happening, the show catapults your preconceptions into the nearest thicket. Suspense builds continuously, with tension mounting relentlessly until you wonder when the elastic will finally snap back.
The series refuses to provide easy answers, instead waving more horrible possibilities before scampering back into the narrative undergrowth. Supporting performances from Eve Myles as DS Annie Cassidy, Emma Appleton as daughter Alana, and Clare Higgins as the wonderfully rumpled Carol add depth and texture to this already rich tapestry.
Final Verdict
If there exists a tauter, clammier, or more engrossing drama this year, I will eat my mortarboard with chips. Gone represents television at its most intelligent and suspenseful, a series that respects its audience's intelligence while keeping them perpetually off-balance. The show aired on ITV1 and remains available for streaming on ITVX, offering viewers the opportunity to experience this masterful crime drama for themselves.
This tense, shrewd series proves that the most compelling mysteries often lie not in what happens, but in how people react—or fail to react—when the familiar world begins to crumble around them.
