LaPaglia and Great Writing - Without a Trace

A person goes missing and the FBI moves in to find them. After the initial interviews of the people who reported the disappearance, the agents explore any number of ways to piece together the missing person’s life, revealing who they really were and what secrets they kept in their lives to find out what happened to them. Bank and phone records, receipts, cars, computer records, ATM withdrawals and whatever else could provide a clue as to a person’s whereabouts.

At times, family and loved ones end up learning things about the person they’ve never thought possible, sometimes the victims are found alive, sometimes dead; and then, there is the rare occasion when a case remains unsolved. These variances give Without a Trace a seemingly endless number of possibilities when it comes to making interesting shows that don’t mirror one another.

The missing start out as blank slates, nobody knows who they are or what has happened to them. Then, in the process of revealing their lives, secrets, lies and relations and as the case heads towards its conclusion, the victims have become complete persons.

As one of the actors explains on the special feature disk, the cases also reveal more each week about the agents’ lives by working these elements into the stories rather than going to these characters’ homes or following their personal lives.

The team of Without a Trace is made up of Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia), Samantha Spade (Poppy Montgomery), Vivian Johnson (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), Danny Taylor (Enrique Murciano) and Martin Fitzgerald (Eric Close).

These five main character (and, by default, their actors), are an amazingly well-cast group. Each of them is interesting and sympathetic and it doesn’t matter which of them is featured more prominently in any given episode: they’re all good and the stories are usually so interesting that they become the focus anyway.

That’s not to say that the show may be just as great if it had been cast with others than those five and of course, getting a weekly dose of Anthony LaPaglia certainly keeps me watching the current episodes on TV every week.

Fortunately, I seem to have caught the show on TV in it’s second season, so only two or three episodes in this box set were familiar to me, but even so, I watched them again with interest; these shows are well-written stories with good dialog and a great cast. I’d rather watch one of these episodes for the third time than some reality show for the first.

Seeing all the episodes in sequence is great since it helps realizing when what storyline was set up and how and, since the show introduces the agents’ lives within the episodes, one gets to catch up on learning about these individuals.

The box set comes in a good-looking packaging and the disks are easily laid out, but not so easily retrieved; my only beef with this set would have to be that the disks were so tightly stuck into their holders that I worried about ending up with two halves of a disk before getting one out. Actually, there’s one more thing that annoyed me: during the first few episodes, it seems the theme music of Without a Trace plays continuously throughout the episodes. It started to drive me nuts and I was quite relieved when that finally changed and the episodes used a variety of music for their score.

There are 22 episodes in season one and a booklet lists not only the episode titles, but also gives a short plot outline, lists the chapters for each episode and lets you easily see which episode has a commentary and which contains “Missing Evidence”, meaning that one can view deleted scenes from that particular episode. It also names the writer and director of each episode and the original air date.

The last episode titled Fallout is a director’s cut 2-part episode turned into one continuous episode for this disk.

Some of the shows are straight-forward stories about a person gone missing for whatever reason, just like it may happen in anyone’s neighborhood. Others do grab on to some current news topic such as the terrorism scare and weave the story into the episode. Especially the episode about a presumed terrorist is well-balanced, making both sides of the argument without trying to impose an opinion on the audience.

Although each episode is captivating, a few stand out even more such as the one about a father, played by Charles S. Dutton, whose son has gone missing years ago. He’s hell-bent not to give up and continues to come to agent Jack Malone to bring him leads he has unearthed himself. This, and one other episode about a news reporter gone missing are the two episodes I can recall where a minor character, introduced in one episode, became the main character of a different episode later in the show. Particularly the episode about the father ruining his own life just to pursue the search for his missing son is easily one of the best-written shows I’ve seen in a long time.

Charles S. Dutton did win an Emmy award as Outstanding Guest Actor for that role. Other awards mentioned in the booklet are another Emmy for Outstanding Art Direction Single-Camera Series for the episode Birthday Boy and a Best Actor in a Drama Series Golden Globe for Anthony LaPaglia.

The special features disk is a collection of commentaries from the actors, executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, executive producer Jonathan Littman, creator/executive producer Hank Steinberg and others, such as the technical advisor who makes sure that the FBI agents on television do behave like the real life guys.

It really comes across during the commentaries that the actors love their characters and really connect with them and at the same time shows them as they really are; Marianne Jean-Baptiste has a very pronounced British accent during the interviews which doesn’t show during the show.

The special feature disk also highlights some moments from the episodes that the actors and makers found most notable and they comment on what the scene or episode meant to them and give a bit of interpretation.

Other commentaries give information about the making of Without a Trace and reveal things like the locations of the show, which takes place in New York City but actually is being shot in Los Angeles. There is also information on editing, costumes, special effects and bringing across the feel of New York when the L.A. sun blares down and how to make the look of the show attractive enough to make anyone who’s just channel surfing without the sound on stop and tune in.

I bought this set as a trade-in from Blockbuster, so it only cost me 10 dollars. The actual price is listed as $39.99. Although I can’t let go of my die-hard CSI obsession, I have to say that the Without a Trace box set offers more than the first season CSI set which comes in at about 60 to 70 bucks. The first season Without a Trace set is definitely worth it’s money.