Items16The creator’s order
  1. 1The Missing (2014)The Missing (2014) 8.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Oct 28, 2014The benchmark for this whole list. A British couple on vacation in France lose their young son at a crowded bar in 2006, and the story cuts between that week and the years of searching that follow, so you watch a marriage, a town and a police inquiry come apart in two time frames at once. James…0
  2. 2Top of the Lake (2013)Top of the Lake (2013) 7.4/10 on IMDbFirst aired Mar 18, 2013A pregnant 12-year-old disappears from the small lakeside town of Laketop in New Zealand, and Elisabeth Moss's detective Robin Griffin has to dig through a community that would rather she didn't. Jane Campion co-created and co-directed it, and the mountains and water around the town are as much a…0
  3. 3Dark (2017)Dark (2017) 8.7/10 on IMDbFirst aired Dec 1, 2017It opens as a classic small-town disappearance: a boy called Mikkel vanishes near the caves outside the German town of Winden, and four families who have known each other for decades start watching one another. Then the show reveals what kind of mystery it really is, and the search for one missing…0
  4. 4Bodkin (2024)Bodkin (2024) 6.9/10 on IMDbFirst aired May 9, 2024The lightest way into this list, though it still has teeth. An upbeat American podcaster arrives in a small Irish coastal town to dig into the disappearance of three people during a Samhain celebration decades earlier, and the locals treat his questions as a nuisance or a threat, depending on what…0
  5. 5Keeping Faith (2017)Keeping Faith (2017) 7.1/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 5, 2017Faith Howells is on maternity leave with her third child when her husband, who is also her partner at the family law firm, goes missing. As she goes back to work to keep things afloat, she learns how little she knew about him, and the small Welsh town around her has opinions about all of it. Eve…0
  6. 6Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018)Picnic at Hanging Rock (2018) 6.2/10 on IMDbFirst aired May 6, 2018On Valentine's Day, 1900, three schoolgirls and their governess vanish on an outing to Hanging Rock in Victoria, and the six episodes are about what that absence does to the boarding school, its headmistress and the town nearby. Every adult turns out to be keeping some version of themselves…0
  7. 7Mystery Road (2018)Mystery Road (2018) 7.5/10 on IMDbFirst aired Jun 3, 2018Two young farmhands disappear from a remote outback cattle station, and Aaron Pedersen's detective Jay Swan works the case alongside Judy Davis as the local cop, Emma James, who knows everyone and is not sure she wants to know more. What the search turns up is an old injustice the whole community…0
  8. 8Safe (2018)Safe (2018) 7.2/10 on IMDbFirst aired May 10, 2018Michael C. Hall plays Tom Delaney, a widowed pediatric surgeon whose 16-year-old daughter goes missing, and every friend, neighbor and fellow parent in his comfortable English community turns out to have something they would rather he didn't find. Harlan Coben created it, and it set the pattern…0
  9. 9The Woods (2020)The Woods (2020) 6.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired Jun 12, 2020The Harlan Coben adaptation with the most ache in it. A Warsaw prosecutor is asked to identify a murder victim, and the case leads straight back to the August 1994 summer camp where he was a chaperone and where his sister was one of two people who disappeared. The story moves between that summer…0
  10. 10Search Party (2016)Search Party (2016) 7.6/10 on IMDbFirst aired Nov 21, 2016The odd one out, on purpose. Alia Shawkat's aimless Dory learns that Chantal Witherbottom, a college acquaintance she barely knew, has disappeared, and she throws herself into finding her, dragging along her boyfriend and two friends who are mostly interested in themselves. It is a dark comedy,…0