Last Seen

Pop Culture Happy Hour

Pop Culture Happy Hour reviews 'Last Seen,' a gripping Apple TV thriller starring Patrick Brammall as Ian, an emergency dispatcher who recei

Key takeaways

• The show balances intense thriller pacing with deep emotional humanity, avoiding gratuitous danger tropes.

Main topics

• Psychological thriller
• Trauma and grief

Notable quotes

"I left her there. It's my responsibility. That's what you get. It's my fault."

Conclusion

Last Seen transcends typical thriller formulas by focusing on emotiona

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) Hey, what's your problem? Speaker 7 (0:01) No, seriously, are Speaker 3 (0:02) your grocery bills too high? Are you spending too much time on your phone? Maybe you're searching for a new job or you're trying to figure out how to set boundaries with your family. Whatever's on your mind, Life Kit has you covered with three episodes every week on health, money, mental health, and so much more. Listen to the Life Kit Speaker 4 (0:19) podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. It is so common that we have these conversations on this show about how a series It's good, but it's eight episodes and it should have been six or it's 10 episodes and it should have been eight or it's 12 episodes and it should have been eight. I think six is just right for this. Speaker 4 (0:43) An emergency dispatcher gets a call one night from a girl he thinks might be his own long-missing daughter. That's the incident at the heart of the very compelling new Apple TV thriller series Last Scene, which follows the dispatcher as he becomes obsessed with finding the truth, even at the cost of his own stability and sobriety. I'm Linda Holmes, and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is culture writer Margaret H. Willison. Hello, Margaret. Hi, Speaker 7 (1:10) Linda. And Speaker 4 (1:11) also with us is culture critic Kristen Meinzer. Hello, Kristen. Welcome back. Speaker 7 (1:15) Hey, great to be back. Speaker 4 (1:16) I'm delighted to have you both here. Patrick Brammel, who you might know from the excellent comedy series Colin from Accounts, stars in this very different kind of show as Ian, a former police detective whose toddler daughter Maggie vanished 11 years ago. Following that tragedy, his marriage broke up in part because of his alcoholism. He left his job. When we find him here, he's a few months sober, now working as an emergency dispatcher. He and his ex-wife, who's expecting a baby with her now husband, are... deeply shaken when the police find a body that might be that of their long-missing daughter. They prepare themselves to finally... perhaps be able to grieve her loss fully. But not long after that, Ian takes an emergency call one night that he thinks is from Maggie. The girl on the phone, now a young teenager, disappears before he can get to her, and Ian becomes fixated on finding her. Last Scene is streaming on Apple TV. Kristen, I'm going to start with you. How did you feel about Last Scene? Speaker 7 (2:18) Wow. I really enjoyed it. This show is like a bingo board of so many things I love. We got off-gritters. We have blurry identities, possibly fake identities, obsessive hunts for the truth. And all of it is very beautifully filmed. It's so cinematic. It's beautifully acted. It's very well-paced. Each episode, when it ended, I definitely was that person who's like, yep, hit that next episode. I'll take the next one. Give me more of this stuff. So I really ate it up. I enjoyed it. I will say it's not a perfect show. It's not perfectly unique. There are some things where, I don't know, I'm just going to say. The tropes sometimes felt a little bit lazy. You know, the alcoholic detective. And there were some Speaker 4 (3:01) tropey tropes for sure. Speaker 7 (3:03) There are lots of tropes. And I was also confused by a couple of things, which maybe we'll get into later. Speaker 5 (3:09) Yeah, there's one key plot point that I was a little confused about. So I'd be thrilled to check in with you guys about it. Yeah. Speaker 4 (3:16) Margaret, what did you think in general? I really enjoyed it as well. I was Speaker 5 (3:20) very... on the fence about accepting this like pop culture happy hour appearance when it was offered to me because I love Patrick Brammell, Speaker 1 (3:28) the Speaker 5 (3:29) show's lead, but I love him from like romantic comedy, Colin from accounts. I was going to say comedy. And I love a thriller, but a thriller where children are in peril can be like a really hard watch, especially when, as I was, I was like watching with an earbud in one ear and like the kids who are a part of my life being rambunctious in the other room. And what I was really grateful for here is that I feel like this show does an incredible job of having like propulsive thriller energy without the engine for that having to be like a woman or a child is in severe danger at all times. And you're just worrying, worrying, worrying that something's going to happen about them. A lot of these things can kind of creep almost into like. almost a sadistic thing. And like, that's not the question here. There's a mystery about what's going on. And then there is a complex moral dimension about sort of what everything is happening here and what the right calls for a lot of different characters are going to be. Speaker 4 (4:30) But Speaker 5 (4:30) in the end, I felt like it was a very humane and compassionate show. It doesn't quite reach the heights of Broadchurch either. I think in terms of the emotional devastation Speaker 4 (4:41) or Speaker 5 (4:41) in terms of quite the quality, but it's definitely operating in that space for me. Speaker 4 (4:46) Yeah, I think it's in the same space as Broadchurch. It's also in the same space as something like Mayor of Easttown. These