(After five episodes)
This Investigation Discovery series looks at an ongoing Police investigation into a large number of suspicious deaths and disappearances among women in a small Ohio town since 2014. Rich material potentially for one of those true crime investigation series which have (in the wake of the first series of the Serial podcast) captured the public's imagination - think Making a Murderer and the Jinx.
Clearly that's what the producers of The Vanishing Women were thinking, packaging it with the requisite trappings: a sinister theme song; tense incidental music; sweeping shots of landscape; a teasing out of the facts over multiple episodes.
But what they haven't provided is the dedication and investigative zeal which helped those unmissable exemplars capture the viewer's imagination. Instead the producers of The Vanishing Women have opted for a once-over-lightly approach, doing no investigative work, failing to deliver any revelations, exposing no new or intriguing theories.
They have simply spoken to families, friends and Police about what happened - providing no more information than these parties had previously provided to any media outlet that asked. Five minutes on Google will tell you more about these cases and those affected than the five episodes broadcast so far.
As a consequence there is nothing for the viewer to take away and ponder - no opportunity to engage in discussion or speculation. Instead we're left with a lazily-done, eminently forgettable, slow- moving and bloated series.
Those needing a new fix of true crime investigation would be better served by the released-at-the-same-time British short-series Unsolved: The Boy who Disappeared on the official BBC3 YouTube channel.
Well made series like Unsolved, The Jinx, Making a Murderer, etc - linger in your mind long after viewing. The Vanishing Women, by contrast, will vanish from your memory in no-time.
