Kaley Cuoco Thriller ‘Vanished’ Is a Lesser Retread of ‘The Flight Attendant’: TV Review

Kaley Cuoco seems to have caught the international thriller bug. The actress followed up her decade-plus stint on “The Big Bang Theory” with two seasons of “The Flight Attendant,” the globe-trotting tale of an alcoholic aviation worker in over her head. Now, she stars in and executive produces the MGM+ series “Vanished,” a more compressed but broadly similar yarn largely set and shot in Marseille. Perhaps more than a decade spent on a Burbank backlot induced a bit of wanderlust in the Emmy-nominated performer.

Much like Cassie of “The Flight Attendant,” Cuoco’s character in “Vanished” is a woman with an interesting yet firmly civilian job in way over her head. Instead of waking up next to a corpse, though, archaeologist Alice Monroe gets on a train with Tom Parker (Sam Claflin of “The Hunger Games” franchise), her saintly doctor boyfriend of several years, for a romantic getaway to Arles — only for Tom to step away and never return to their seats. In a device far too overused in this genre, an opening flashback indicates that Alice’s amateur investigation into where Tom went will put her in mortal danger. But it also doesn’t take her long: “Vanished,” which was directed by “Spice World” producer Barnaby Thompson and written by Thompson’s son Preston, spans only four episodes, leading to a rushed conclusion that doesn’t have time to unpack the implications of its sensational reveals. (David Hilton is credited as co-creator with Preston.)

As a result of this brevity and the aforementioned parallels with “The Flight Attendant,” “Vanished” often feels like a slighter redux of a mode Cuoco has already explored at greater length and depth. Alice has the same sarcastic charm as other products of Cuoco’s comedic background, but here the performance feels like it’s fighting against an otherwise straightforwardly dramatic tone. I kept wishing “Vanished” would play into the comedy of Alice’s fish-out-of-water situation; maybe the plot could be a spoof on the modern dating concept of ghosting, but with assassins and human traffickers instead of unanswered texts. After all, Tom takes off right after Alice suggests the two settle down in New Jersey, where she’s just been offered a job at Princeton, rather than sporadically meet up in exotic locales when their schedules allow. Instead, the series’ humor is rare and often rooted in stereotypes so stale I wasn’t sure if the joke was intentional, like a local police chief (Simon Abkarian) who refuses to meet with a panicked Alice because he’s late to the cinema.

Due to Tom’s disappearance, Claflin is largely absent outside of flashbacks that show the couple’s meet-cute in Jordan, where Alice was digging for artifacts and Tom distributed vaccines for a pro-refugee NGO called SOS Global. In a weird way, it’s a nice change of pace for the male half of a heterosexual relationship to be the subject of such slow-motion, sepia-toned nostalgia, motivating his partner on her present-tense quest for answers. No matter which gender gets this treatment, however, it’s still a reductive way to communicate character, and we don’t get much of a sense of Alice and Tom’s relationship beyond her understandable attraction to a kindly care worker with cut-glass cheekbones.

With Tom off God knows where, Alice teams up with French journalist Hélène (Karin Viard) — who just so happens to be on the train when he goes missing — to track him down. Their investigation takes them to the Marseille offices of SOS Global, where Tom’s colleague Alex (Matthias Schweighöfer) offers context on his state of mind. If “Vanished” is not especially enticing as a mystery, it’s at least a handy visual tour of an exciting, underrated city, from the rocky seaside to graffiti-lined public squares. Shooting on location pays off, even if I don’t love the way shots of a predominantly Middle Eastern neighborhood are used to emphasize Alice’s sense of vulnerability and danger after Tom disappears. Cuoco’s professional success has given her the opportunity to travel the world on the clock, one she’s taken full advantage of — but it may be time for the actor to settle down stateside, or at least change things up.

All four episodes of “Vanished” are now streaming on MGM+.