Kaley Cuoco Leads France-Set MGM+ Thriller

In HBO Max’s dizzyingly entertaining The Flight Attendant, Kaley Cuoco played an American who becomes embroiled in a big and dangerous conspiracy after her one-night stand is murdered during a trip abroad. Much of the fun stemmed from the fact that her Cassie is no super spy or master detective, but an ordinary woman who gets in way over her head, and then proves surprisingly resourceful under pressure.

In MGM+’s new thriller, Vanished, Kaley Cuoco once again stars as an American who becomes embroiled in a big and dangerous conspiracy after her man, a long-term boyfriend this time, disappears during a rendez-vous abroad. Once again, she plays a normie who has no idea what she’s doing; once again, this frequently underestimated woman demonstrates impressive mettle in extreme circumstances.

Theoretically, then, Vanished should hit some of the same pleasure centers that The Flight Attendant did. Instead, this miniseries plays like a version of that story with all its personality and ambition removed — which is to say, like one that amounts to not much at all.

Created by David Hilton and Preston Thompson, the drama begins, like a truly exhausting number of recent thrillers have, in media res, with Alice already in pursuit by some sort of knife-wielding, motorcycle-driving assassin. The story then jumps back a week earlier, to Alice’s arrival in Paris. She’s there to meet Tom (Sam Claflin), the love of her life. Though they’ve been dating for years, her jet-setting work as an archaeologist and his with a Jordan-based NGO means their romance has played out entirely through passionate trysts in hotels around the world.

The plan is for the couple to ride down from Paris to Arles for a week of champagne, oysters and massages, in an exclusive luxury hotel Tom’s pulled some serious strings to book. But several stops in, Tom seemingly disappears from the train without a trace. Frantic, Alice disembarks in Marseille and throws herself into searching for him — over the skepticism of a local cop, Drax (Simon Abkarian), who assumes Tom’s just another shitty boyfriend, and the reassurances of Tom’s boss, Durand (Matthias Schweighöfer), who’s sure Tom’s just working through some personal issues and will come back on his own.

It is initially hard to pinpoint what exactly makes Vanished underwhelming. There are plenty of things it does right, or at least adequately. At four episodes, each well under an hour, it’s a blessedly quick watch, without any extraneous storylines or self-indulgent noodling to slow it down. Cuoco does a fine job of playing Alice’s wide-eyed distress, and then her steely resolve. Around episode three, she falls into a cute buddy-cop rapport with Karin Viard’s Hélène, a journalist as Frenchly blasé as Alice is Americanly earnest.

Plus, in perhaps the best reason to watch it, the views of Marseille are almost improbably nice. As Alice crumpled over in her hotel room in fear and sorrow, I caught myself admiring the fact that her balcony opens right over the water. I wondered how it was that a woman in such dire straits had the wherewithal (or, for that matter, the cash) to book such a charming place, and whether that view wasn’t wasted on a woman too upset to appreciate the view, and how much it might cost me to enjoy it for myself someday.

The problem is that Vanished never gets around to a reason to care very much about the mystery at hand. That Alice has no driving motivation beyond “find Tom” (and then, relatedly, “try not to die”) is understandable. That she has to have it explained to her that as an archaeologist, “You look for clues in the past to tell you about the future” — because despite Cuoco’s natural charm, Alice is so personality-free that neither she nor we would understand this otherwise — is less so.

Her relationship with Tom is too generically sweet to believe in, playing out in flashbacks so perfectly picturesque and lovey-dovey they could be lifted from travel brochures. Tom himself comes across in those scenes as almost too saintly to be believed. Which, in fairness, is part of the point: As Alice learns more about the queasy circumstances surrounding his disappearance, she begins to question whether she ever truly knew her partner at all. But since we never do get a clear picture of who he actually is, then, or what the relationship was, we have no chance to muster up any strong feelings about them either way.

Meanwhile the deeper we dig into the conspiracy, the odder the show feels. The characters’ decisions seem reverse-engineered to get the plot where it needs to go, rather than guided by any intellectual or emotional logic. (Even then, the story leans heavily on coincidences.) Eventually, they nudge the characters toward reveals that feel far too dark and heavy for a show that otherwise wants to coast on how fun it is to watch Cuoco wriggle her way out of tense and occasionally action-packed jams in a cute seaside city, and then toward a resolution too rushed to land with the emotional impact it ought to.

Vanished isn’t a terrible time, really. It ought to do just fine as, say, a distraction to throw on your iPad while riding the train to a sexy getaway with a lover who’s definitely exactly who you think they are, and not hiding any sordid secrets that might get you killed. But by the time Alice finally packs up to go home and leave this whole bloody mess behind, I found myself more than ready to do the same.