Without A Trace

This column first appeared in the Age, on July 19 2003

I was one of those children who would run up to strangers on the street and hug them, a habit adults tried to discourage. And I did give it up. Two crimes in particular have imprinted themselves on my memory, changing my view that the world was a safe place. In January 1976 there was the disappearance of Eloise Worledge from her Beaumaris home. It's a case that has been receiving a lot of press in the last few weeks because of the recent inquest. Only eight-years old she was just a few years younger than me. We lived in the same city. She'd been at home, asleep in bed. I think of her often, with a fervent hope that her suffering was brief. Exactly a year later there was the brutal slaying of Suzanne Armstrong and Susan Bartlett in Easey Street, Collingwood and I became obsessed with that as well. What about the little boy? I kept asking. The one asleep in his cot when his mother was murdered?

We all have these stories, these memories, and Without a Trace, the drama premiering on Channel 9 this week (Wednesday, 9.30pm) plays to this, our worse fears. It is another Jerry Bruckheimer production (his show CSI Miami debuts an hour before it) with the associated visual zip. But what distinguishes it is a fine cast and strong plotting.

Senior Agent Jack Malone (Australian actor, Anthony la Paglia), heads the New York-based Missing Persons Squad of the FBI. His team includes Samantha Spade, (played by another Australian, Poppy Montgomery) and Vivian Johnson (Academy Award nominee, Marianne Jean-Baptiste). Their job is to decide whether a missing person has been abducted, murdered, committed suicide, or simply run away. They do this by using tools such as psychological profiling to reconstruct a timeline detailing every minute of the 24 hours prior to a disappearance. They follow one rule: learn who the victim is in order to learn where the victim is. The pilot is an affecting episode about a 13-year-old girl who disappears from the bus stop on the way to school. Like Eloise she came from the leafy suburbs, a place where no one expects this kind of thing to happen.

Without a Trace is better than a lot of shows around but for me it raises a question. What does it mean when most of our viewing these days is about forensics and violent crimes? I am thinking of, among other shows, the multiple CSIs and Law & Orders. In his film Bowling for Columbine Mike Moore suggests that America's gun culture is fuelled by a culture of fear. It is shows like Without a Trace that breed such fear, and the mindset that no one and nowhere is safe. Of course such crimes really occur, but like fun park mirrors these shows distort and reflect them back at us, making them bigger, blowing them out of proportion. Which doesn't mean, of course, that it's not good TV.

Permanent Link for this Article