If you’re a parent, you know how much anxiety you get when your child is on a playdate at someone else’s house, and how much that anxiety ramps up when they’re sleeping over at a friend’s place. Imagine, then, you put your trust in a parent you don’t know to watch your kid and the unimaginable happens. That’s the idea behind a new thriller on Freeform.
Opening Shot: A car drives through a winding wooded road. When it stops, we see a girl in what looks like the car’s trunk. When she finally sees daylight, she looks up and asks, “Who are you?”
The Gist: Elisa Blix (Denise Gough, who you may recognize from Andor) works as a flight attendant for a private jet company; her husband Jim (Jim Sturgess) is a high-profile defense attorney. After one of her flights, Elisa rushes to the school where her 9-year-old daughter Lucia (Beatrice Campbell) attends. She’s late for pickup as usual, but sees Rebecca Walsh (Holliday Grainger) there. She and her daughter are new to the school, and it seems that Lucia has become fast friends with Rebecca’s daughter. The girls plead with Elisa to allow Lucia to come to Rebecca’s house for a few hours, and Elisa finally relents.
Once she’s home, she gets a call from Lucia asking if she can sleep over, something she’s never done before. Elisa drives to Rebecca’s gorgeous modern house to drop off some of Lucia’s things, including her favorite stuffie.
Elisa checks in with James the next day while she’s at work and realizes Lucia hasn’t come home yet. She flies back to Manchester, and they go to Rebecca’s house; they’re horrified to find out that it was a short-term rental place and Rebecca is nowhere to be found.
As word gets out that Lucia is missing, Elisa keeps getting blowback that she left her daughter under the supervision of a woman she didn’t know. But other things come out during the investigation of DI Shona Sinclair (Bronagh Waugh) and DS Lizzie Walker (Layo-Christina Akinlude), namely the fact that Fred was carrying on an affair via texting and video calls.
After the Blixes have a press conference about Lucia’s disappearance, with Elisa making a direct appeal to Rebecca, one journalist, Selma Desai (Ambika Mod) thinks that Lucia was targeted and not a random abduction. There’s something about Elisa that feels wrong to her, but the editor at the website she works for just wants her to stick to the facts of the case.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The Stolen Girl reminded us of another recent show about an abducted girl, The Glass Dome.
Our Take: The Stolen Girl is written by Catherine Moulton and based on the 2020 novel Playdate by Alex Dahl, and it seems to want the audience to put itself in position to be skeptical of Elisa, even though she’s seemingly a mother whose daughter was abducted.
Immediately, we’re supposed to parent-shame Elisa for letting Lucia sleep over the house of a woman she just met, and that theme is hammered over our heads a few times during the first episode. Then we get Selma, who seems to be the only journalist covering the case who thinks there’s something strange about Elisa.
It’s a weird way to approach this kind of story, but the idea that Elisa is at all culpable in her daughter’s abduction feels like a huge signal to viewers that there’s more to Elisa’s story than meets the eye. One other thing we found strange is that, while Grainger is the top-lined star of this series, we barely see much of Rebecca during the first episode. That tells us that Rebecca didn’t abduct Lucia randomly, and that at some point, the audience may be put in a position to be more sympathetic for her than for Elisa.
The story is supposed to have a lot of twists, which is why we were so disappointed that the first episode was so predictable. As soon as Elisa let Lucia go to Rebecca’s house, we knew that she was going to be gone sooner rather than later. Also, we’re not given a chance to examine anything about the Blix family before their world is torn apart. We know that it’s “cooler” to get this information piecemeal via flashbacks and other information throughout the season, but in a case like this, doling out this information in dribs and drabs doesn’t give us enough information to establish how we feel about the main characters.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Rebecca watches footage of the Blix’s press conference, repeating Elisa saying, “Please don’t hurt our daughter” over and over.
Sleeper Star: Ambika Mod’s character Selma is probably going to be the one who breaks this case wide open, so we’ll pick her.
Most Pilot-y Line: The detectives reading Fred’s sexy texts aloud to Fred and Elisa feels like it was a bit much. Why not just show them the texts?
Our Call: STREAM IT. While the first episode of The Stolen Girl is a bit too predictable, there does seem to be a really twisty story underneath the predictable premiere.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
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