3 out of 5

Created by: Harlan Coben

covers season 1

Reliable entertainment.  It’s a baseline requirement to ask for of TV, and The Five provides.  As a missing kid mystery, it’s similarly reliable in its problem set: things are dragged out too long; the twists are a bit of a stretch; the red herrings for dramatic effect are a bit exhaustive when you acknowledge how pointless they are.  But back to that first aspect of reliability; The Five settles on four leads you don’t mind spending time with – the fifth suggested by the title is the missing one – catching us up on their various plot threaded-lives years after the younger brother of one went disappeared as a youngster.

Guilt tails our troupe, as they all (predictably) have secrets going back to that time, but in keeping with the engagingness of the cast, our writers don’t harp on this: their secrets are those of children: things that have emotional effect but that aren’t giant backpedals or role reversals.  That stuff is well handled, and doled out at a believable “I forgot to mention…” pace.

One afternoon, five kids headed out into the woods.  Young Jesse never returned.  A later captured serial killer would cop to having the boy on his list of victims, but the lack of a body leaves a hopeful mother, a prone-to-anger father, a brother with relationship struggles who turned to practicing law; a friend whose rambunctious streak increased more so, becoming a protected, via a safe house, for destitute children; the angsty friend with the cop father who worked on the case has similarly become a cop, now caring for his mentally-fogged ol’ dad; and the girl – one-time romantic interest of some of the boys – seemingly ran away out of state, now unhappily married and with child.

You can connect the dramatic dots as events – Jesse’s blood discovered at a recent crime scene – draw them back together.  But the refrain: Because this is well cast, we’re interested to watch, even if some of those friends are painted in questionable lights at points.  They feel human, and generally respond as humans, so we can dig it.

Humorously, then, is that the mystery is less interesting, and you can smell the stack of herrings as the shoe dawdles on them.  Avowed mystery watchers swallow this stuff willingly, though, and The Five has enough of interest and quality stuffed between its main events to justify our eye-time, even if ten episodes is a bit of a stretch of that good will.