October 3, 2007

HBO's "Five Days" Best Consumed in One

Miss the premiere of HBO's gripping miniseries, Five Days? Fear not, says Seth Arenstein — it's best viewed in one sitting, on demand.

FIVE DAYS: Gripping miniseries taps into modern fears.

HBO and the BBC’s excellent mystery miniseries Five Days is an old-fashioned whodunnit that takes place in a drab-looking present-day Britain. It's also timely, with missing persons cases such as British toddler Madeleine McCann dominating headlines and worrying families in the U.K., U.S. and abroad.

The plot is simple. Leanne, a mother of three young children, vanishes, almost into the proverbial thin air, while taking her two youngest kids to visit their grandfather. The script, by Gwyneth Jones, loads plenty of complexity onto that skeleton. There’s so much to deal with that, at some points, the viewer temporarily forgets the reason we’re all here is because Leanne (Christine Tremarco) has gone missing. 

The beauty of this drama, though, is that in each of the five episodes the crime and its victims are looked at through the eyes of various constituencies: the police, the press, the neighbors (one of whom, played by the always engaging Sarah Smart, becomes overly involved with the situation), not to mention her children, husband, ex-husband, and anxious parents.

As is often the case with sensational crimes today, each of the parties has an agenda, never mind that a woman who is a wife, a mother and a daughter is missing.

And while the people on the ground are coping with her disappearance, big brother is watching. Throughout the piece we are reminded that off in a dark room filled with computer monitors and efficient-looking policewomen, video surveillance cameras have been silently capturing and relaying footage. But even they are relatively powerless to explain how a woman has disappeared beside a busy highway in broad daylight.

On the other hand, modern technology will come in handy here. We strongly advise watching Five Days’ iinstallments in relatively quick succession, using a DVR, TiVo or — for cable customers with HBO On Demand — on VOD. The rich plot details and myriad characters will be easier to follow that way.

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