Pop Culture Happy Hour - Last Seen

Episode Date: September 17, 2026

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' TV heavy-hitters get dark in 'The Beast In Me'Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport 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.See 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

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 ten 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. 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. Hi, Linda. And also with us is culture critic. Kristen Minds. Hello. Kristen, welcome back. Hey, great to be bad. I'm delighted to have you both here.

Patrick Bramel, 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. 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. Kristen, I'm going to start with you. How did you feel about Last Scene? Wow, I really enjoyed it. This show is like a bingo board of so many things I love. We got off gridders.

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. No. 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, the alcoholic detective. There's some tropey tropes for sure.

There are lots of tropes. And I was also confused by a couple of things, which maybe we'll get into later. 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. Yeah. Margaret, what did you think in general? 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 Bramel, the show's lead, but I love him from like romantic comedy, Colin from a house. I was going to say comedy.

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, 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. 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 Broad Church either, I think, in terms of the emotional devastation or in terms of quite the quality. But it's definitely operating in that space for me. 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 with their own lives. I really liked this too. And I share your sense, Margaret, that when I think about Patrick Bramel, I think about comedy and particularly romantic comedy. And when we were warming up for this episode.

I was like, oh, Patrick Bramall, like one of Linda's favorite sexy man, 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 Kristen said, that has a lot of tropeiness 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 cost other people in his life. And it's not a show where I don't understand how he's become so alienated from everybody, right? I left her there.

It's more responsibility. That's what you get. It's my fault. You didn't leave her there. She wasn't alone. I'm a bad dad. She was with her son. I did leave her there.

I did. I'm her dad. 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. 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 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, 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. 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. her own feelings about what's happening. And those feelings go in lots of different directions. Yes, Chloe Jean Lourdes. 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. Can you tell me your name?

Sarah. Sarah. Maybe it's Mags. I don't know. I can't remember. Did you say Mags? Can you say it again, please? Can you say again? I think that that's part of the joy of this show, even though it's a dark thriller, 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? Yeah. There's a lot of that happening on the show. And that's part of what makes it a pleasure. I think it is so impressive.

The level of character development and complexity, the 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. Yeah. They feel very whole and textured in just really, really impressive ways. I loved that.

We've got a lot more to talk about. We'll be right back after this break. 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's 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 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 young girl, Sarah, really gets to be a complicated person who's got our own stuff going on. And I really liked how balanced it was in that sense. We've talked a couple 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 ten 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 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 gave 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. Right. It starts to move pretty efficiently. And in fact, they have time to do a thing that has. has been called out by the great and good friend of the show, Catherine Van Aeronaunt, which is a penultimate episode that is a flashback.

Oh, my gosh. Which is such a common maneuver. And when I saw it, I was like, no. No, I actually thought of you, Linda, because you and I've been on several episodes where we have called that over before. And I was like, is Linda also yelling at the TV now? 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 on the whole, I think six episodes is the right length for this show and keeps it propulsive in the way 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? Right. 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 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. Yeah. And I got to say, I know you both love Broadchurch.

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 discovered. anything. It's just a scoopy-do moment. Like, by the way, kids, all along it's been me. And that doesn't happen on this show. It is a bit the opposite of that in the sense that, like I said, they give you the gist pretty early. 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. And it does sometimes, I think. 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 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. Right. Instead, I'm like, 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? Yeah. 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. 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? Right. 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. Right. Cool. Wow. This puts things in such a fascinating context. 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 convincing enough to me. I get that. 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. 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. 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.

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 Muffuddin, 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. 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 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. Right. There are lots of levels of culpability for lots of 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. Willis and Kristen Mineser, thank you so much for being here to chat about this show that we all like. That's a late as usual. Thank you. This episode is produced by Liz Metzger, Lennon Sherburn, and Mike Katzif, and edited by our show runner 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.