Viewers of "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under" and, most recently, "Tell Me You Love Me" have come to expect a certain amount of drama, sex and vulgar language from HBO programming.
But with its new miniseries "Five Days," HBO delivers all the drama anticipated while exhibiting markedly reserved amounts of sex and obscenity. The miniseries is a collaborative effort between HBO and BBC Films, which might explain the relatively tame nature of the show.
"Five Days" may not meet HBO's seemingly requisite quota of four-letter words, but its storyline is so compelling and its characters so perplexingly, convolutedly intertwined, a viewer almost doesn't notice.
Leanne (played by Christine Tremarco), an attractive young mother, contents herself with taking just two of her three children to visit her ailing grandfather when her eldest daughter Tanya (Lucinda Dryzek) refuses to accompany them in disobedient, whiny-teen fashion.
On her way to the nursing home, Leanne decides to pick up flowers from a roadside vendor. She waves at her small children, Ethan (Lee Massey) and Rosie (Tyler Anthony), as a truck passes. The next thing viewers know, Leanne is inexplicably, mysteriously, gone. Left to their own devices, seven-year-old Ethan and four-year-old Rosie limply wander along the highway armed only with their dog and their mother's abandoned flowers.
Things become increasingly muddled when Kyle (Rory Kinnear), who viewers recognize as a creepy but seemingly harmless loser from an earlier scene at the gym, approaches the children and says, "I know your daddy - and your mummy. Why don't I take you to your mummy?" These children apparently never learned the "don't talk to strangers" rule, and, terrified, decide to accept his offer.
The five-episode miniseries began on Oct. 2, and a new episode will air every Tuesday this month at 8 p.m. In true HBO style, many, many repeats of all the episodes will air throughout the month.
As the title might indicate, each episode of "Five Days" depicts one day of the chaos surrounding Leanne's abduction. The show begins on Day One but progresses in a non-linear fashion. Each successive episode will depict days 3, 28, 33 and 79 of the case, allowing viewers to draw their own conclusions regarding exactly what went on in the interim.
The media is a constant, gnawing presence on the show. Highlighting what's become a phenomenon both in America and Britain, where the series is set, photographers and journalists hound the family for information and dirt to make their headlines even juicier.
The police have an uneasy relationship with the media from the start. Their public relations liaison is in the unenviable position of putting a positive spin on a woman and her children's abductions and the police; having more important issues to worry about, ignore her as much as possible. Despite his public avoidance of the media, the chief of police seems to pander to a newspaper man who, aided by the chief, conjures up stories that will sell papers.
Therefore, it is not surprising that no character on this show seems wholly guilt-free. Even the never-visited grandfather in the nursing home is somehow suspect in this intriguing crime. Further complicating matters and arousing suspicion, all the characters seem to be involved in each other's lives somehow. In the first two episodes, it remains unclear exactly how they're all connected and why these connections are relevant, but one cannot ignore the intertwined, fluky character run-ins that writer Gwyneth Hughes presents.
Each episode moves somewhat slowly, but the series is impossible to stop watching. At each episode's close, viewers are left wanting answers but seem only to encounter more questions. We just have to wonder how, or if, things will make more sense in upcoming weeks and who, of the dozen or so main characters, could be responsible for the abduction.
