Last Seen

The new Apple TV series Last Seen is a compelling thriller. It stars Patrick Brammall (Colin from Accounts) as an emergency dispatcher named who gets a call one night from a girl he thinks might be his long-missing daughter. The show follows him as he becomes obsessed with finding the truth, even at the cost of his own stability and sobriety. It also tackles some thorny questions about who stands to gain and lose from solving this case. Looking for other compelling thrillers? Check these out: Emmy Rossum tracks down a female serial killer in 'Furious' https://www.npr.org/2026/07/28/nx-s1-5909173/emmy-rossum-tracks-down-a-female-serial-killer-in-furious TV heavy-hitters get dark in 'The Beast In Me' https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5610973/tv-heavy-hitters-get-dark-in-the-beast-in-me Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu.

• 0:15Linda Holmes?

  It is so common that we have these conversations on this show about how a series, it's good, but it's eight episodes and it should have been six, or it's 10 episodes and it should have been eight, or it's 12 episodes and it should have been eight. I think six is just right for this.

• 0:34Linda Holmes?

  An emergency dispatcher gets a call one night from a girl he thinks might be his own long missing daughter. That's the incident at the heart of the very compelling new Apple TV thriller series, Last Scene, which follows the dispatcher as he becomes obsessed with finding the truth, even at the cost of his own stability and sobriety. I'm Linda Holmes and joining me today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour is culture writer Margaret H. Willison. Hello, Margaret.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Hi, Lynda.

• 1:01Linda Holmes?

  And also with us is culture critic Kristin Meindler. Hello, Kristin, welcome back.

• 1:06Speaker 03

  Hey, great to be back.

• 1:08Linda Holmes?

  I'm delighted to have you both here. Patrick Brammall, who you might know from the excellent comedy series Colin from Accounts, stars in this very different kind of show as Ian, a former police detective whose toddler daughter Maggie vanished 11 years ago. Following that tragedy, his marriage broke up in part because of his alcoholism. He left his job. When we find him here, he's a few months sober, now working as an emergency dispatcher. He and his ex-wife, who's expecting a baby with her now husband, are deeply shaken when the police find a body that might be that of their long missing daughter. They prepare themselves to finally, you know, perhaps be able to grieve her loss fully.

• 1:50Linda Holmes?

  But not long after that, Ian takes an emergency call one night that he thinks is from Maggie. The girl on the phone, now a young teenager, disappears before he can get to her and Ian becomes fixated on finding her. Last Scene is streaming on Apple TV. Kristin, I'm going to start with you. How did you feel about Last Scene?

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Well, I really enjoyed it. This show is like a bingo board of so many things I love. We got off gritters. We have blurry identities, possibly fake identities, obsessive hunts for the truth. And all of it is very beautifully filmed. It's so cinematic. It's beautifully acted. It's very well paced. Each episode, when it ended, I definitely was that person who's like, yep, hit that next episode. I'll take the next one. Give me more of this stuff. So I really ate it up. I enjoyed it. I will say, it's not a perfect show. It's not perfectly unique. There are some things where, I don't know, I'm just going to say, the tropes sometimes felt a little bit lazy, you know?

• 2:50Linda Holmes?

  Yes.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  The alcoholic detective and there were-

• 2:52Linda Holmes?

  There's some tropey tropes, for sure.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  There are lots of tropes. And I was also confused by a couple of things, which maybe we'll get into later.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's one key plot point that I was a little confused about, so I'd be thrilled to check in with you guys about it.

• 3:06Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. Margaret, what'd you, what'd you think in general?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I really enjoyed it as well. I was very on the fence about accepting this, like, Pop Culture Happy Hour appearance when it was offered to me because I love Patrick Brammall, the show's lead, but I love him from, like, romantic comedy Colin from Accounts.

• 3:24Linda Holmes?

  I was going to say comedy, yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  And I love a thriller, but a thriller where children are in peril can be like a really hard watch, especially when, as I was, I was like, watching with an earbud in one ear and like, the kids who are a part of my life being rambunctious in the other room. And what I was really grateful for here is that I feel like this show does an incredible job of having, like, propulsive thriller energy without the engine for that having to be, like, a woman or a child is in severe danger at all times and you're just worrying, worrying, worrying that something's going to happen about them. A lot of these things can kind of creep almost into, like, almost a sadistic thing. And like, that's not the question here. There's a mystery about what's going on.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  And then there is a complex moral dimension about sort of what everything is happening here and what the right calls for a lot of different characters are going to be. But in the end, I felt like it was a very humane and compassionate show. It doesn't quite reach the heights of Broadchurch either, I think, in terms of the emotional devastation.

• 4:32Linda Holmes?

  I get that, though.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  Or in terms of quite the quality, but it's definitely operating in that space for me.

• 4:37Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, I think it's in the same space as Broadchurch. It's also in the same space as something like Mayor of Easttown. These kind of very troubled detectives that have their own trauma and their own things going on and are maybe investigating things that do or might have something to do, you know, with their own lives. I really liked this, too. And I share your sense, Margaret, that when I think about Patrick Brammall, I think about comedy and particularly romantic comedy. And when we were warming up for this episode, I was like, oh, Patrick Brammall, like, one of Lynda's favorite sexy men, right? And that is very much, you know, very much was my sense of him. I think he's terrific in this. And I think one of the things that always, when you are talking about something, as

• 5:20Linda Holmes?

  Kristin said, that has a lot of trope-ness to it, a lot of it comes down to, do you care about and are you captivated by this lead performance? And does that character manage to be more than just this collection of tropes? I really like the fact that they are quite honest at several different junctures in this show about what his choices and behavior

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:45Linda Holmes?

  cost other people in his life.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:47Linda Holmes?

  And it's not a show where I don't understand how he's become so alienated from everybody, right?

• 5:54Speaker 04

  I left her there. It's my responsibility. That's what, that's what you get. It's my fault.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  You didn't, you didn't leave her there. She wasn't alone.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  I'm a bad dad.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  She was with your son.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  I did leave her there. I did. I'm a dad.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 6:10Linda Holmes?

  He has a son from another relationship prior to the mother of his little daughter, from whom he's divorced when we get here. And the relationship with his son is troubled in different ways.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:22Linda Holmes?

  And I think as you get into it, it's very honest about the fact that this is not a simple thing where he's a wonderful hero. He is obsessed with answering this question and I think the show is very wise, and you both sort of alluded to this in different ways. I think the show is very wise about making sure you understand that this girl, who is now a 14-year-old, this, this girl who he believes is the same girl as his daughter, if she is, she's an independent person who has agency and feelings and thoughts and a history that now largely doesn't include him. And so if he was right about that, what happens then?

• 7:02Linda Holmes?

  Which is something that I think some stories like this do not always tackle head on, which is, you know, to him, he's been missing his daughter every day that she's been gone.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:13Linda Holmes?

  She hasn't been sitting around thinking about him. She's been a kid growing up where she was growing up. And so what the heck happens if you turn out to be right? And I think it's very smart that they give her the agency and the thought to have her own feelings about what's happening. And those feelings go in lots of different directions.

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Yes, Chloe Jean Lord's, she is fantastic. She does not do what our lead character wants her to do. She does not do what anyone expects her to do necessarily when faced with, this is my past, or maybe this isn't my past, or maybe this is the thing that I've been told.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Can you tell me your name? Sarah. Sarah.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  Sarah, maybe it's Mags. I don't know. I can't remember.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Did you say Mags? Can you say again, please? Can you say again?

• 8:05Speaker 06

  I don't know. Maybe it's Mags.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  I think that that's part of the joy of this show, even though it's a dark thriller.

• 8:12Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Is that not everybody always does what we want them to do on the show. And to see a show where people don't always do what we want, like, oh, no, don't do that. Don't do that thing. Oh, you're doing that thing. Ooh, ooh, don't react that way. Oh, God, you're reacting that way? What?

• 8:29Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  There's, there's a lot of that happening on the show and that's part of what makes it a pleasure.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  I think it is so impressive, the level of character development and complexity this show was able to fit into six episodes. It's like, there are a number of characters who could have been afterthoughts, who I feel get substantial developments. And even characters like his ex-wife and her new husband, who could sort of easily fall into, like, tropey behavior, like, they function in the plot very much as like, this predictable check on his behavior. Even with that, I get a real sense of who each of those people are as individuals and not just as how they function in his life.

• 9:17Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  They feel very whole and textured in just really, really impressive ways. I loved that.

• 9:23Linda Holmes?

  Mm-hmm. We've got a lot more to talk about. We'll be right back after this break.

• 9:29Speaker 00

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• 9:58Speaker 07

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• 10:42Speaker 07

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• 10:50Linda Holmes?

  Welcome back. I think one of the best scenes in the show is between Ian and his ex-wife, Debbie, she's played by Jessica Wren, in which she is reacting to him in a way that on the one hand, I felt you feel an urge to say to her, like, maybe she's being unfair to him, but at the same time, you can completely understand absolutely every atom of the reaction that she's having in that moment. And it's really difficult to make a show where in that moment, I felt so much sympathy for both of them in this extraordinarily difficult moment that they're having. I really felt for both of them, and I felt for the pain that they were both feeling. And she, I agree with Margaret, she gets to be a

• 11:35Linda Holmes?

  whole person. And I think both she and, as we mentioned already, this young girl, whose name is Sarah, you know, and she says, well, maybe I'm also Maggie, but this, this young girl, Sarah, really gets to be a complicated person who's got her own stuff going on. And I really liked how balanced it was in that sense. We've talked a couple of times about both the pull of going from one episode to another and how much they fit into these six episodes. It is so common that we have these conversations on this show about how a series, it's good, but it's eight episodes and it should have been six, or it's 10 episodes and it should have been eight, or it's 12 episodes and it should have been

• 12:16Linda Holmes?

  eight. I think six is just right for this, and it does not allow it to bog down because the first two episodes, you know, as you watch those, they really give you the gist of what's happened. And there are still some open doors, you know, but they give you the gist in the first two episodes. Then it starts to move, right? And you don't just sit around waiting for people to find things out. It starts to move pretty efficiently. And in fact, they have time to do a thing that has been called out by the great and good friend of the show, Catherine Van Arundel, which is a penultimate episode that is a flashback.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 12:55Linda Holmes?

  Which is such a common maneuver. And when I saw it, I was like, no.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  No, I actually thought of you, Linda, because you and I've been on several episodes where we have called that out before. And I was like, is Linda also yelling at the TV?

• 13:09Linda Holmes?

  I was, but I think there are still some questions about whether maybe all of that was necessary. But I do think the guts of it are necessary. But I think in, on the whole, I think six episodes is the right length for this show and keeps it propulsive in the way that, that Margaret was talking about, and keeps it from kind of just becoming, oh, my gosh, I'm just waiting around for these people to figure out what's going on. When is somebody going to see something that's going to tell them what's happening? And how is, you know, because there are a lot of people in this story who need to find out different things at different times about what is happening. And if you dole that out

• 13:51Linda Holmes?

  correctly, then you get a kind of a constantly shifting landscape of who knows what. And that's useful for kind of keeping the narrative moving.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I got to say, I know you both love Broad Church. This is much better than Broad Church, in my opinion. It's paced better. And my big issue with Broad Church is in the end, he never discovers anything. It's just a Scooby Doo moment, like, by the way, kids, all along, it's been me. And that doesn't happen on this show.

• 14:19Linda Holmes?

  It is a bit the opposite of that in this, in the sense that, like I said, they give you the gist pretty early.

• 14:24Speaker 02

  I think also, there are certainly some plot points where if the writing weren't as adept as it is, it could feel overly convenient. You're like, oh, okay.

• 14:33Linda Holmes?

  And it does sometimes, I think.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  It does. But what I think saves it is like, when there's an over convenience in the plot, in terms of moving it forward, in terms of what we and the characters on the show know, it is counterbalanced by the characters doing unexpected things with that information. Like, very early on, there's a moment where one character knows another character is like, a link in a chain that could lead to him and a huge threat, and not necessarily showing allegiance to him. And they're on a boat. And I was like, well, I know where this is going. But I didn't, I didn't know where it was going. And I think that's what saves it. Like, I'm not distracted by like, well, isn't it convenient that somebody has like, the most recognizable car engine in the history of the world? Instead, I'm like,

• 15:16Speaker 02

  oh, wow, isn't this moral dilemma they've set up interesting? And aren't the ways that people are choosing to interact within it fascinating?

• 15:25Linda Holmes?

  And there, and there are a couple of moments where, you know, because you mentioned the boat thing, it's very easy to have a reaction like, there is absolutely no way that this person would go out on a boat in the middle of nowhere with this person at this juncture in the story. But if you don't necessarily play that out the way people expect, then it just becomes a different scene, and it becomes a scene that you watch as a scene.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it gives you an opportunity to be like, what are the conditions that would have made a person go out on that boat? Those are some of the things that get answered in the flashback episode, which is the other reason I think the flashback episode is so useful, is because it really does shade in a lot of really cool stuff that I hadn't necessarily guessed, right? I wasn't like, obviously this, obviously that, obviously that. I was like, oh, interesting this, interesting that. Cool. Wow. This puts things in such a fascinating context.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  That being said, I did feel like some of the flashback stuff did try to overly convince me of certain things where I'm like, oh, that's why that person has that alliance. And I was confused by it. I'm like, this doesn't convince me that this alliance should be taking place here. That's not, that's not convincing enough to me. So that was among the main things that confused me. Because I said early on, I'm like, there were a couple of things that were like, what? I don't know if that makes sense.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  It's so reasonable. The thing that I had been confused about, plot point wise, I was like, I actually think this speaks to the skill of the writing of the show, is the half brother of the kidnapped girl was presented as Ian's child. But in the show, he is always at Debbie's house. And that's just such a quiet choice that's not overwritten, that then tells you so much about Debbie.

• 17:05Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. And unless I missed it, they don't go into where Dean, the son, where his biological mother is, or what her situation is. They present him as Ian's biological son, who is also Debbie's son in every meaningful way. And it's the way their family is and operates.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah. And Maggie's brother, in a very haunting way, he's Maggie's brother, which, he is carrying his own burdens emotionally. And he does a beautiful job of depicting that, of any feelings of conflict, of guilt, of, is it my fault? Did you put me in a bad position? You know, Tobias Maffadon, the actor who plays Dean, apologies if I'm pronouncing that wrong, he's just terrific, showing those internal conflicts, all of the different burdens and love that he feels for his missing sister.

• 17:57Linda Holmes?

  I think what I like best about the show is that it doesn't turn out to be about what it necessarily seems like it's going to be about. It is about this obsessive search on Ian's part to figure out what happened. But as you, as we discussed early on, it's more about what does this search and whatever it uncovers mean for all these different people who have these very complicated feelings, you know, as Kristen alluded to, you know, Dean's sense of guilt and, you know, but also anger, why was I ever put in this position in the first place and so forth. There are lots of levels of culpability for lots of

• 18:37Linda Holmes?

  people about lots of things. And I think that's what makes the show, I think, compelling to me. As we said, Last Scene is streaming on Apple TV. That brings us to the end of our show. Margaret H. Willison, Kristen Meinzler, thank you so much for being here to chat about this show that we all like.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  A delight, as usual.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 18:58Linda Holmes?

  This episode is produced by Liz Metzger, Lennon Sherburne, and Mike Katsif, and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Linda Holmes, and we'll see you all next time.

• 19:14Speaker 07

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