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Missing, without a trace

July 26 | our TV junkies

There are certain things in life you can count on.

A cheeseburger from Macca’s will always have two slices of gherkin. The cat will wake you up every morning at precisely 5.55 doing Nadia Comanechi-style leaps on the bed in a bid to earn her breakfast. Lindsay Lohan will be arrested for some type of booze-related offence again next week.

And every Wednesday between 9.30pm and 10.30pm on Channel 9, someone will be lost and found.

The weekly episode of Without a Trace will begin with some poor individual going about their normal, everyday activities and then – poof! – they will disappear faster than you can say abracadabra and you will have to watch for a full hour to discover where they went.

Until last night. Yesterday’s unfortunate victim, a senator, was enjoying a glass of wine while floating about on a boat when suddenly she was stabbed in the back by a large fish hook, then bundled into a large chest and dropped into the ocean.

Of course, no-one at the FBI’s Missing Person’s Unit – headed by Aussie boy done good in La-La Land Anthony LaPaglia as the seasoned senior agent Jack Malone – realised that she was dead as they dug into the details of her life for clues to her fate.

Could it be the dodgy-looking husband whodunit? Or maybe the strangely effeminate businessman who contributed big bucks to the senator’s election campaign, only to find out later she wasn’t going to vote for his oil-drilling project?

According to the credits, this episode was written by LaPaglia himself, and I reckon it was one of the best in ages. Sure, it’s nice having those things in life you can count on, but sometimes you want that extra bit of gherkin in your burger – or a divergence from the usual plotline.

It may lack the glamour and forensic finesse of CSI, and it can’t boast the longevity of Law & Order, but I would argue that Without a Trace is one of the better police dramas to come out of the US. Maybe it’s because it stars a couple of Aussies (Sydney-born Poppy Montgomery stars as LaPaglia’s fellow FBI agent Samantha Spade).

My only complaint is that Channel 9 chooses to shove the show in the late slot, after that series where the female cop with the bad hairdo digs up decade-old corpses in a bid to solve cold cases.

So, love it or hate it? What do you think is the best police show on TV?

— SUZANNE KEEN