Critic’s Pick: ‘The Missing,’ ‘QB1: Beyond the Lights’

“The Missing” (Starz, starts Sunday). An excellent sequel to the excellent 2014 limited series of the same name, linked by a theme — the obsessive search for a missing person — and the character of French detective Julien Baptiste (Tchéky Karyo). Like its predecessor, it runs on multiple chronological tracks, distinguished by a haircut, a hair color, weather, behavior and details that are not quickly explained, leaving a mystery in the middle whose solution proceeds alongside that of the mystery at the end: double the mystery, double the vertigo. Sole screenwriters Harry and Jack Williams, who also scripted the first series, do not hurry to fill in the blanks, as the older timeline advances toward the newer, and the newer timeline moves toward its conclusion.

In the first series, Baptiste searched for a boy who disappeared in a crowd on a trip to France; here, he is contacted when the sudden return of a girl missing from a German small town for 11 years intersects another case that the now-retired Baptiste never solved. As before there are parallels, puzzles, ironies and a sense of existential fragility.

That big hunk of moody gravitas David Morrissey and the soulful Keeley Hawes play the girl’s parents, British citizens attached to a local army base, whose lives grow more rather than less stressful and complicated after their daughter (Abigail Hardingham) reappears. The wonderful, weighty Karyo, more central to the action this time out (it’s the detective’s need for closure that drives the story forward) plays a sleuth in the French tradition, rumpled and philosophical. (“Do you ever feel like your family is slipping away from you?” he is asked. “All the time,” he responds, offering a theme of the first and second series. “We feel that way only because we want to hold them so close.”)

As in the first series the locations and landscapes, which include Germany, Iraq and Switzerland, are incidentally yet deeply part of the drama. A more than supportive supporting cast — many characters’ sorrows and secrets are woven into this plot — keeps real a story that turns on extraordinary circumstances. And though many of the elements here are familiar from other tales of disappearance and reappearance — it’s a veritable genre — each scene and every player is authentic in turn.

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“QB1: Beyond the Lights Peter Berg” (Go90, starts Wednesday). Peter Berg (“Friday Night Lights”) is the executive producer of this oddly sweet, casually poignant fly-on-the-wall documentary series, produced by Complex Networks for the mobile platform Go90, about three talented high school quarterbacks in their senior year. As a person with no interest in football — if anything, some negative feelings toward it — I am not its likely audience; but I am interested in people, the places they live and the things they do, not distorted by the sensational demands and judgments of garden-variety reality television.

The quarterbacks in Berg’s lens are extraordinary talents who have their collegiate near futures set and bear the unusual weight of their position and talent — they’re local stars, interviewed and photographed. But they’re also still-evolving teenagers stumbling into adulthood, with parents who support and worry over them.

Although I expect that as the 10-episode series gets closer to the end traditional dramatic mechanics might kick in, the three episodes available for review are more about the present moment than the next one. The focus is on atmosphere — at times, literally about the color of the sky — and activities not immediately related to football: a ping-pong game, a birthday party, a haircut, a social media misadventure, an English class in which the professor conveniently discusses Joseph Campbell: “The hero at this point has become master of two worlds — they have conquered both their original self and they have conquered the challenges of the special world as well; everyone throughout history has a story like this … you’re living one every day.”

robert.lloyd@latimes.com

Follow Robert Lloyd on Twitter @LATimesTVLloyd

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