Commentary

New 'Missing Persons' Drama On Fox Needs Time To Find Itself

The more years I accumulate in the business of critiquing TV shows, the less comfortable I feel about negative reviews.

Over the years, I have come to understand that a great many people have invested a lot of time and money in the hard work that goes into making the TV shows that I have the opportunity to watch in advance of their premiere dates.

Each show employs a lot of good, hardworking people. I have no desire to take any role, no matter how small and insignificant, in jeopardizing their livelihoods.

I even go into each daily assignment in the hope that watching the upcoming show of the day will be a great experience, or at least pleasant.

This approximately 120-word, throat-clearing introduction to this TV Blog is meant to set the stage for this review of the new Fox drama “Alert: Missing Persons Unit,” a new police procedural from executive producers Jamie Foxx and John Eisendrath.

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Let the record show that I wish I were extending a laurel and hearty handshake to this new cop series about a missing persons unit in the Philadelphia Police Department.

As a native son of the City of Brotherly Love, I will admit that I try my best to give our Philadelphia-based TV shows the benefit of the doubt. This presented a challenge here. 

“Alert: Missing Persons Unit” stars Scott Caan and Dania Ramirez as a soon-to-be-divorced couple.

They still have a great deal of love for each other, but their marital troubles stem from the disappearance of their own young son six years before the show’s first story gets underway in Episode One.

Already an officer in the Philly PD, she became a detective and gravitated toward the MPU because of the presumed abduction of her son.

As the series opens, we see her at work on another child kidnaping. Also employed in the same unit: Her current love interest and soon-to-be fiancé.

At the time of their son’s disappearance, her ex-husband was some sort of swashbuckling special forces contractor working for U.S. forces in Afghanistan who was known for his courage, resourcefulness and heroism.

In the premiere episode of “Alert: Missing Persons Unit,” he earns himself a job in the MPU working alongside his soon-to-be ex-wife and her soon-to-be new husband. 

At times, everybody spars. And at other times, they come together as a team to find the missing. At still other times, this special-forces hero and his detective ex-wife are still searching for their son using company resources on company time.

This is one complicated Missing Persons Unit! And yet, they do find the time to do actual police work, even if much of their work comes across as inept -- or worse, incompetent.

For example, they raid a motel room where they believe a kidnaped child is being held. But in executing this raid, they failed to station anyone at any of the other entrances or exits where the baddies might make an escape, which is exactly what happens.

However, they don’t get away because the female detective somehow catches up with their moving car on foot after jumping into a pool and shoots the driver to death.

This causes a serious smash-up, but lo and behold, the kidnaped child emerges completely uninjured.

Spoiler alert: A short time later, this traumatized girl then gets kidnaped a second time while under the protection of the very same detective.

Another raid on a hotel room in Las Vegas fails because the raiding party failed to notice a suspicious character in the hotel lobby using his cell phone to tip off his cronies in the hotel room.

One would think the cops would be savvy enough to scope out the lobby for personality types who shouldn’t be there. But here, that did not happen.

How do I know so much about police procedures that I feel qualified to question them here? That’s an easy one. Such knowledge comes not from real-life police work, but from other police shows.

But what do I know? I just watch TV for a living.  

“Alert: Missing Persons Unit” premieres on Sunday (January 8) at 8 p.m. Eastern after NFL football on Fox. The show debuts in its regular time period next evening, Monday (January 9), at 9 p.m. Eastern.

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