Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email
Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter
Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter
None of us know how we would react to the news of the body of a loved one being found in woodland near our home. But David Morrissey’s painfully uptight headteacher Michael Polly’s first thought is to furiously reprimand Detective Annie Cassidy (Eve Myles), who has just delivered this terrible news, for walking mud into his house. It is, as we’ve already learned by that point, fairly typical behaviour. Polly is, as Cassidy puts it, “a funny fish”. Might he also be a murderer? Let’s just say that on the basis of early impressions, it doesn’t seem impossible.
ITV’s new crime thriller Gone is a fiction but one inspired by real-life detective Julie Mackay and crime journalist Robert Murphy’s 2024 book To Hunt a Killer. As such, it has the ring of both practical and narrative veracity. Michael Polly lives for his work: the plush private school on the outskirts of Bristol over which he presides is clearly organised in his own image – starchy, strict, terribly proper, seemingly seething with all manner of unresolved darkness. His unfortunate daughter Alana (the excellent Emma Appleton) and his self-evidently even more unfortunate wife Sarah are also teachers at the school. It’s horribly cosy and cosily horrible. Mr Polly concludes pretty much every conversation with his family with the words “I’ll see you in assembly”. Soon, it sounds more like a threat than a promise.
Gone is written by George Kay, who was also responsible for 2023’s outstanding The Long Shadow. Among the many dramas that have attempted to get under the skin of the Yorkshire Ripper murders, The Long Shadow was unusual for its willingness to pull back from the crimes themselves and explore the troubled internality of those most affected by them. This largely meant women: Peter Sutcliffe’s victims and near victims and the female detectives forced to endure the sometimes subliminal but always poisonous misogyny which enveloped the era like smog and of which Sutcliffe was merely an extreme manifestation. And Gone is another story about masculinity and institutions; about powerful men and gamely struggling women; about people defined by their identities and stifled by their environments. It finds its drama – which is considerable and involving – in nuance and it is confident enough to eschew the crass and the obvious.
open image in gallery
David Morrissey as an uptight headteacher in ‘Gone’ (ITV)
It isn’t just a domestic story though. As a missing persons enquiry turns inexorably into a murder investigation, Detective Cassidy finds herself sidelined. There’s an unfolding backstory around her too; a slightly boilerplate troubled romantic relationship and, more intriguingly, the repercussions of an unsolved case from eight years earlier. Soon, she isn’t the chief investigating officer anymore.
The implication that this might somehow be man’s work is left hanging. Instead, she becomes the police’s family liaison. She’s clearly miffed by the downgrade. However, with a family like the Pollys, it’s plenty to be going on with. They have a large, creaky old house to sneak around in. An instinct for omerta worthy of the Cosa Nostra. And enough pregnant, guilty secrets to last a copper a lifetime.
Gone is a six-part series and only two episodes were made available pre-transmission. For all of its promise, it may or may not stick the landing. It will probably be best served by not trying to do too much; keeping its circle tight and developing as a series of acute character studies. However, while a reviewer’s job involves avoiding spoilers, at this point, the question of whether or not Michael Polly killed his wife feels almost incidental. There’s already a deadness about him; a toxicity resulting from suffocating maleness, an institutionalised life, an inability to see other humans as anything much more than bodies for his beloved school rugby team.
Morrissey is a fine lead, as ever manifesting a stoical but unravelling, deeply repressed middle-aged man with unnerving skill. Myles is a likeable antagonist too, expressing a convincing blend of compassion, irritation and wary, midlife disappointment. Everyone, even the school’s teenagers, seems slightly haunted.
open image in gallery
Jennifer Macbeth and Eve Myles in ‘Gone’ (ITV)
However, Gone’s real cleverness lies in its setting up of a deliberately obvious premise but then constantly asking the viewer to question their own judgement. Are we all going to jump to predictable conclusions about Michael Polly? A six-part drama about a single murder has to reveal its truths gradually. Gone is a slow burn but its attention to detail means few moments are wasted. Towards the end of episode two, Polly stumbles off to a shed on the school’s grounds and finally breaks down and cries. Are these tears of trauma? Of stress? Of guilt? A mixture of all three? It’s nicely ambiguous and fittingly representative of a drama that is never quite as straightforward as it seems. Might Michael Polly be innocent? That doesn’t seem impossible either.
